Desk Box c. 1937

Joseph Rothenberg made this sketch of a desk box sometime in his life, using pencil on paper. You can see the light, tentative marks he’s made, a kind of ghost of a box, all potential. It reminds me that art-making is a process, a back-and-forth conversation between intention and accident. Look closely, and you'll notice the delicate lines, the faint shading. There's a real tenderness to the way he’s rendered the dimensions, with tiny notes about measurements. It’s so subtle, almost like he’s whispering secrets about construction. The surface of the paper is almost untouched, leaving space for the imagination to fill in the details. Rothenberg's drawing echoes the detailed technical drawings of Hilla and Bernd Becher, with a similar attention to detail, although here we see a personal, even intimate vision of the mundane. Art is like that, always echoing, always in conversation. It’s about opening up possibilities, not closing them down.