Like some of these-in Steinbach’s case, Walter Benjamin and Primo Levi come to mind-with the outsider’s uninured view, he has been able to discover languages and meanings in the alien environment’s apparent disorder and confusion, chaos and abyss. Steinbach, who came to America from Israel in 1957, at the age of 13, shares with many others the disorienting experience of being torn away from the ancient house of his own culture. He uses the simple but perfect device of the shelf on a number of levels to symbolize and catalyze the issue of memory. Steinbach takes possession of them, working with the threat of their transience, turning it around till he achieves cultural artifacts. The objects are prevented from evanescence, kept-by both the fact that they have been picked out and by the fact of our attention-on this side of the shadow line beyond which they would otherwise fall into an endless vertigo, into oblivion. Following the Duchampian tradition, he individuates elements with his gaze, extracting them from the magmatic mass of every other serially produced object, pulling them from the precariousness of their indistinctness. Steinbach has found them in the mazes and seas of stuff that constitute the supermarket, in the wild landscapes of the antique shop, the forests of the flea market. Destined to vanish, these objects are the mysterious sphinxes of our culture. THE ELEMENTS THAT HAIM STEINBACH chooses for incorporation in his art most often come from the field of the mass-produced object, a flat field in which very little distinguishes itself from anything else and even less has a permanent place.
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