Rauschenberg: Apogamy pods : November 17 to December 20, 2000

Apogamy Pods consists of twelve paintings notable for their spare, elegant compositions. Rauschenberg chose "apogamy", asexual reproduction, for the title since he "wanted these paintings...to grow out of themselves, to contain their own contradictions and get rid of narrative, which is the sex of picture-making. Usually, the images in my paintings make narrative whether I intended them to or not. They have that kind of logic...I was really trying not to make narratives, to keep the images apart and have them relate the way real memories relate to one another, by their look, by their shape or their transparency, by their colors, and their atmospheres. It was very hard to do. The hardest thing since I erased Bill's drawing." Author and critic Dave Hickey contributed an essay to the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Referring to Rauschenberg's celebrated 1953 Erased De Kooning drawing, Dave Hickey writes, "(it was) an endeavor that was more about ingesting de Kooning's practice than destroying his drawing--an act of internalizing de Kooning as a farmer might enrich his fields with the remnants of last year's crop. Over the next forty years, Rauschenberg created his extravagant, proliferating rain forest of art...Now he is clearing the land again, this time of his own old growth. These days, Rauschenberg is erasing Rauschenberg."