‘Men in Cars’ is an attempt to reach the borders of medal art from a viewpoint that lies outside the medal art world. When the perspective comes from outside the medal art world, what happens to its borders? Will they move inward or outward or will there be obscured?

‘Men in Cars’ is influenced by earlier work that lay within the discipline of medal art but always investigating and testing the boundaries. ‘Men in Cars’ possesses criteria that already define medals. Form, movement and idea are strongly connected, only size seems to disagree.

In the ‘Men in Cars’ project, I am dealing with an interesting question that surfs through my whole medal oeuvre; ‘Does the medal perform only physically or, can the medal escape those restrictions and perform independently of form in the heads of the spectators? The Romans more or less played with this question in giving their coins the function of propaganda. The holders of the coins became part of the coin by spreading the meaning and by talking about it.

In 2014, can we make the intellectual context of a medal only by viewing and experiencing or do we need the physical content?

In ‘Men in Cars’ the position of the spectator is in the middle of the medal. He or she views the edge of the medal from the inside and becomes part of the medal him or herself. He or she can only take the medal home in his or her head, as they possess the medal in their heads after watching it. But doesn’t this work the same way with bronze medals?

‘Men in Cars’ has been exhibited in 2013 in a dome with a diameter of 16 meter. 4 projectors of 5000 lumen illuminated the moving men on the circular wall forming the edge of the medal. Showing in smaller or larger venues is possible, but the wall has to be round and the spectators have to be able to position themselves in the middle of the space, created by the circular wall.

Showing the clips of the men driving a car on monitors will be possible as well. The screens have to be of a large enough dimension to form a circle so spectators can stand in the middle of the circular display.

‘Men in Cars’ deals with 1950’s popular movies in which actors drive a car in films. The 1950’s status of possessing a car is related to today’s traffic jam problem. Around the world, people sitting in their cars driving the same way or standing still in a long queue waiting for each other. Still the social status is visible, so is the happiness and confidence of the men driving a car.

The protection of the steel car creates a private space while driving in the wilderness of the outside world. A Woody Guthrie song that plays during the show binds these thoughts together.

The series of short films of men driving a car was inspired by an earlier medal ‘Jam Tomorrow’ that was shown in Fidem 2012 in Glasgow. The medal contained a rubber strip, holding rows of small bronze cars that could be folded up in a bronze ring.