Big time

The Art, Life, TV blog has just alerted us to the recent passing of Claes Oldenburg's wife and collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen. We were planning to do this anyway at some stage but it seems appropriate to launch into an overdue Oldenburg Big Things tour:

INVERTED COLLAR and TIE, Frankfurt an Main (partly obscured by the tower and not yet available on Street View)

Here is their giant SHUTTLECOCKS sculpture.

FREE STAMP in Cleveland.

The CRUSOE UMBRELLA is excellent viewing.

Casting a long shadow over the tradition on vertical monuments it parodies (bludgeons?), here is BATCOLUMN in Chicago. Check out the cosmic beam of light the bat appears to be deflecting in STREET VIEW!

And best of all from this vantage point, perched on top of a building in Koln, DROPPED CONE looks like it has fallen from the sky.

Image: Ice-cream Koln, photo found here

8 Easy Pieces

Here are some classics:

Walter De Maria, Lightning Field

Michael Heizer, Double Negative

Michael Heizer, City

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels

Robert Morris, Observatory

James Turrell, Roden Crater

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty

Donald Judd, Chinati Foundation

I'll come back to each of these later on, once things get going, but for now we need some sort of foundation to get the ball rolling. I know, they're mostly American males of a certain generation but we'll work on that.