“When Rauschenberg was drafted at the age of eighteen, he told the Navy recruiters that he didn’t want to kill anyone. A sympathetic captain posted him to hospital duty, where his first job in a tuberculosis ward was to bathe and wrap corpses. Next, he was sent to a rehabilitation camp for maimed and crippled servicemen. Later, he worked with combat survivors, ‘No I was not forced to fight,’ he said, ‘what I witnessed was much worse. I got to see, every day, what war did to the young men who barely survived it. I was in the repair business.’
He was trained at San Diego Naval Hospital as a neuropsychiatric technician and then assigned to Camp Pendleton in California to work with sailors and marines with brain damage—or whose minds had been blown apart by the shock of the killing. ‘Everyday your heart was torn until you couldn’t stand it,’ he said, ‘and then the next day it was torn up all over again. And you knew that nothing could help. These young boys had been destroyed.’”
Robert Rauschenberg, Mane (Salvage), 1984, acrylic and collage on canvas
When I was re-editing the footage taken during the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL, I was intrigued to learn about Rauschenberg’s time during the war before he began to study art. While I so appreciated the gift of this residency, Bob was such a giant. I could not personally connect to his legacy. But now I imagine him differently. I grew up in postwar Japan reading and seeing the works created by artists who had experienced World War II. The war imposed on people different priorities and restrictions for years, not just months.
A pandemic is NOT a war. Saying otherwise is inarticulate and dangerous. But I take some comfort in remembering people's extreme hardships that transformed their lives.
— Eiko
Photo by Terry Van Brunt, courtesy of the Rauschenberg Foundation