Married by Powers (with Frac Nord-Pas de Calais)

Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two maniac collectors from Flaubert's book, derived from a few stones from the Celtic past not only all of Western culture but the 'meaning' of that culture as well. Those menhirs lead them to construct the phallic wing of their museum: ''.... in former times, towers, pyramids, candles, milestones and even trees had a phallic significance, and for Bouvard and Pécuchet everything became phallic. They collected swing-poles of carriages, chair-legs, cellar bolts, pharmacists' pestles. When people came to see them they would ask: 'What do you think that looks like?', then confide the mystery, and if there were objections, they shrugged their shoulders pityingly.

The phenomenon of collecting, the basis of a museum, is that the set of objects the museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representation of the universe [....]. Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the museum but a 'bric-a-brac', a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original object or metaphorically for their representations''.

Married by Powers (with Frac Nord-Pas de Calais)

Though not convinced of any universal vision whatsoever, Bik Van der Pol are interested in the possible significance of collections and archives, and in how - time and again- different meanings can be derived from them. Culture as such means little, for todays's cultural resistance is tomorrow's art object or commercial product. Of more importance are the conditions of cultural production, how culture is produced. Or in this case: the way a collection can be activated and revitalised, as a tool or even a weapon,...to view, comment and rethink culture. Because this is how points of view and positions can be adjusted, changed, developed and sharpened.

A collection with accompanying storage- the depot- hardly ever leaves the cellars of the museum where it is concealed, and if it does, usually in small parts. Married by Powers enlightens some aspects of the collection: transport, storage, presentation, documentation, mediation, public, and personal interpretation, and makes an attempt to render transparent this extensive collection by bringing it into action as material, as a literal think tank.

On the invitation of FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and TENT, Bik Van der Pol made a choice from the FRAC collection.