ART INSIGHTS Creating Wealth as a Successful Artist - John Dahlsen

that entails. The term also refers directlyto the amorphous extrusions created whena plastics moulding machine is cleaned atthe end of a production run.Dahlsen began collecting these cast offs,destined either for landfill or recycling,while researching a public art projectfor a plastics manufacturer. The brightlycoloured and completely random formsare extremely suggestive, generative of allkind of interpretative possibility. Dahlsentreated them at first like readymades —sculptures in their own right. He then beganexperimenting with their potential as stilllives: a quintessentially contemporary stilllife subject, given their synthetic quality,their disposability, and their integral role inthe petroleum industry, a key perpetratorof environmental disaster.Robert Smithson once claimed that “art canbecome a resource that mediates betweenthe ecologist and the industrialist” inreference to his many (unheeded) proposalsto mining companies to participate in163