Environmental art

Environmental art describes a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. The field has been described by historians such as Jeffery Kastner and Brian Wallis who published Land and Environmental Art (1988). The text focuses upon the evolution of environmental art away from formal concerns, worked out with earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. Read together with Suzi Gablik's Has Modernism Failed and the Reenchantment of Art (1984, 1992), and Barbara Matilsky’s rigorous catalogue from Fragile Ecologies (1992) the historic precedents for this work become more obvious, as do the development of integrated social and ecological approaches, as an ethical, restorative stance emerged in the 1990s. Over the past ten years environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions around the world as the social and cultural aspects of climate change come to the forefront.

Here's to Shutting Up

Here's to Shutting Up is the eighth studio album by Superchunk. Brian Paulson, who served as co-producer, previously worked with the band on 1994's Foolish.

On this album, the band continued to develop away from the fuzzy punk-pop of its earlier days to something more textured. Keyboards, strings and acoustic guitars abound, and even a pedal steel makes an appearance on "Phone Sex."

The band left "Phone Sex" out of the initial performances of the accompanying tour; with the 11 September 2001 attacks a painfully fresh memory, the members felt uncomfortable performing a song featuring the lyrics "Plane crash footage on TV / I know, I know that could be me."

The title of the album is taken from the opening of the song "Out on the Wing."

Track listing