Pure Paint, Dead in the Air
Berlin Review, Published on 10.09.2024
For my dad, who quit flying little Cessnas for safety when I was born, but can still teach his daughter a thing or two about planes
I.
If I had to tell you how to land a Mikoyan-Gurevich-29 fighter jet, I’d tell you they come in hot. Not like landing on a carrier hot, but still, with a high stall speed of 250 kilometers per hour, pilot, you’d better stay on that throttle until you’re damn close to the airstrip, even if you need to use the chute in the end. Granted, I am a thirty-something year old effete Brooklyn writer who would probably piss herself even just riding in the second training seat of MiG-29’s American equivalent F-16, and also can’t even drive, so you probably shouldn’t trust me on that one too literally. Metaphorically though, you should, because I’m doing a similar thing today. It’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the asphalt is spongy, and I’m heading to MoMA a little headachy from staying up late re-watching both Top Gun movies back to back. The room I’m going to is a small one that wouldn’t even fit a MiG-29. Gallery 515 houses three late Monets instead: Agapanthus 1914–26, and Water Lilies 1914–26 (the name of two separate works on facing walls). But a late Monet is like a MiG-29 in lots of ways, and here I’m telling you, you can watch him ride the throttle until the last possible second.
In Agapanthus 1914–26, Monet’s brushwork is the larger, cataclysmic version of his usual controlled small strokes. He comes in hot here too, skid marks on the runway. The degree to which Monet’s work as a whole acquired institutional legitimacy, even within his lifetime, makes it seem less daring, more dorm room poster in historical retrospect than it does in person. Strangely, late Monet retains the kind of shock jock seat-of-the-pants capacity his earlier work—though also done plein air and in short periods to capture real-time shifts in light—has been stripped of in its normative, unthreatening status as a museum stalwart. This is an unfair perception, but it just looks risky even when, because at this point Monet had a master’s control of his work, in some senses it technically isn’t. It’s like the stall, the moment in the air when forward speed is insufficient to sustain lift and the plane’s engines cut out. This seems like a catastrophe or a high-wire stunt, but it isn’t at all.
Stall speed is an important thing to learn for a pilot, especially the pilot of a MiG-29 that pulls tight moves in air-to-air combat. Fighter pilots learn how to specifically stall a plane on purpose and use the mechanism of pulling out of the stall to their advantage all the time. To stall a MiG-29 on purpose you pull the stick all the way back so that the pitch of the plane is near vertical in the air just as you decrease the throttle close to 250 km/h, while the drag on the front of the plane’s full face slows your speed. To pull out of the stall you change the angle of attack back downward again and, using the acceleration of gravity to your advantage, you go full throttle all at once, fast, and speed back up to closer to 500 km/h. In the terms of my normal world: this looks like a drag queen doing a death dive on stage, and is kind of a similar thing, but in a plane and with less eye makeup. In Monet’s late work, it’s where you can see those giant strokes on Agapanthus 1914–26 terminate without disappearing into the background paint, just the faintest tail end of acrylic clinging on to horsehair and the white primed surface of the ground. Pure stall, dead in the air.
And then again, he comes back downward, into the flower, thick and fast, slick spit-up green stem, full speed like it’s nothing. In both the MiG-29 and on the canvas, this is happening in real time. In the moment of an afternoon, Monet captures the Agapanthus in its flickering, flowering, hot-wet radiance in some field, and the room for error is pretty close to zero here. Except there’s no ejector seat on an easel, and once it’s set, oil lasts hundreds of years, so in a way, Monet can risk more than quick, explosive death. His risk is a posterity, and by the end of his career when his works were received with relative acclaim, he knew it. And he took the risk anyway, because he believed he was good enough to pull it off. That’s where brush jockeys and stick jockeys meet; a kind of brashness, a good gall, an overmuchness of faith in one’s self that could be really annoying if they didn’t manage to do what they did.
II.
I’m going to pull a stick jockey kind of move myself and swing to Rilke instead of Mallarmé, the expected water lily poetics for when it comes to Monet. In a dogfight, surprise is your ally. So too, in capturing the vagaries of light. In a volume published just after MoMa’s Water Lilies 1914–26, the one that curves around the small side-gallery’s wall, Rilke writes this [trans. Poulin]:
Nénuphar
J’ai toute ma vie, mais qui la dirait mienne
me priverait, car elle est infinie.
Le frisson d’eau, la teinte aérienne
sont à moi ; c’est encore cela, ma vie.
Aucun désir ne m’ouvre : je suis pleine
jamais je ne me referme par refus, –
au rythme de mon âme quotidienne
je ne désire point –, je suis émue ;
Par ce mouvement j’exerce mon empire
rendant réels les rêves du soir
car à mon corps du fond de l’eau j’attire
les au-delà des miroirs …
Water Lily
My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.
No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal—
in the rhythm of my daily soul
I do not desire—I am moved;
by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors…
Nénuphar—unlike the English «water lily» or the German «Seerose»—is not a compound noun formed out of existing French words. If it sounds sensuous, foreign, exoticized, it’s because for Rilke, and Rilke’s particular French, it is: it ultimately comes from the Sanskrit. French Rilke feels more open and louche than German Rilke to me, the body at the bottom of the water splayed out to the sensibility of the world beyond. The MiG-29 has special intake vents on the top of the wings so that it can land anywhere, even on dirt runways, while an F-16 needs a spotless carrier deck or tarmac, clear of even a screw. There’s an intimacy there, the way Water Lilies 1914–26 has huge, rough white strokes that plumb the depths of its water, picking up the grain of the canvas beneath, an intimacy in and with the landscape’s light made possible by Impressionistic form. There’s an intimacy there, a cold metal thing of the sky wheels down in the earth of some makeshift field airstrip, with grass stippled like paint.
A sideways-ness applies to this same intimacy, to the glancing of light off of Giverny’s ponds. As for Rilke with nénuphar, there’s no lower deck cutoff, no closure of the self with refusal; the MiG-29 can fly low, engines as open as lily blossoms, closer to mountains, cliffs, and cities than any other comparable fighter plane. That is what supermaneuverability means; an «angles fighter» can take the edges of the landscape in stride, accommodate their difficulties, and render them an advantage. The way for me to know this, is in sideways language too: the manual for the MiG-29 is only declassified as the MiG-29E, the export version once flown by NVA pilots in East Germany, then used as part of a reunified German air force in the 1990s and translated again into English for American fighter pilots, who travelled to Germany to try them. NATO MiGs have a slightly different weapons and cockpit configuration. It’s the translated one we came to know; the normalized exotic, nénuphar from Sanskrit into French into German and English, those lilies on the wall at MoMA in big fat, round to ovoid, almost alien strokes, because immediacy has no literal translation either. They may look like lilies, too, but not if you come too close to the wall, when the red-pink blotch in the middle is like a targeting acquisition circle lit up and ready for missile lock. Then they look like they might be abstraction, infinite ripple, nothing that resolves into lilies at all, but remain just paint.
III.
Late Monet isn’t just a mirror of the world’s sensuous immediacy, it’s a magnification, a desire intensified by the required distance to see it as a landscape. HOTAS is the acronym used for planes, hands-on-throttle-and-stick, but the MiG-29 isn’t a HOTAS plane, you have to look down at the cockpit and move your hands accordingly. Late Monet, in his big straw hat and his cataracts, squinted down at the paint and made his strokes bigger, wilder, distended, instead of being careful. Monet’s late style is a daring style for this reason too; like Rilke he refuses to be deprived, to be closed off with refusal.
It’s a weird Priapean thing, that stick of a MiG-29. Fighter jets, like fast cars, are often stuck with phallic allegory. To make it worse, the MiG is designed for Soviet pilots of often smaller stature than their NATO counterparts. When you plunk a tall American or German in there, the stick hits right between the testicles if they have them. Actually, women flew MiG-29s more often in the Soviet Union than they flew F-16s in the US, and equally interestingly, several women were crucial to the plane’s design. It doesn’t matter though, because the MiG-29 is masc-coded, like all the fighter jets I see on the USS Intrepid, permanently anchored as a flight museum here in New York City. The dads walk around the deck of the former battleship, offering facts about planes to other dads. They are all dads, and they bond when they gesture at the empty sockets of the jet engines. Tom Cruise is like this in the Top Gun franchise too, a man’s man to the point of being homoerotic.
Early and middle period Monet, by contrast, is femme-coded. Indeed, the earlier Impressionist works in MoMA’s galleries tend to be surrounded by throngs of mostly girls and women. Many take influencer-esque selfies; Monet has been having a moment as a symbol for a certain vague artistic internet sensibility that stands in for the actual risk of art-making lately. In the women’s, but not the men’s, tank top section on the way to the pharmacy at my local Target, I spot a printed cropped tee, designed to fit tightly just over the breasts, with a middle-period water lily Monet and the artist’s name written in cursive, roughly nipple to nipple.
Both of these gendered stereotypes are, of course, stupid and unfair. Spending time in Gallery 515 reveals that it’s much more gender diverse than either the earlier Impressionist galleries, or the flight deck of the Intrepid. Late Monet isn’t femme-coded—something about the risk—but it’s still vulnerable, escaping the guys being dudes world of fighter planes and the general critical line of abstract expressionism coming out of Impressionism into abstraction until the reclamation of the works of Joan Mitchell—herself influenced by Monet. An angles fighter can make tight pivots, air on air en plein air, femme-to-masc, gendered both ways and none. You could queer late Monet almost as fast as a MiG-29 could launch an R-27 missile from your 6 o’clock blind spot, before you even had time to eject from the cockpit.
The body at the bottom of the water, the huge, rapid, passionate strokes that only resolve into objects as you move if at all; these are not fixed targets. Which is to say: late Monet breaks a lot of rules on the wilder edges of early semi-abstraction. It pulls a cobra maneuver, it gets behind you in that blind spot where you can’t quite see that delicate weapon that eludes category—gender, critical reception, lineage, the sideways, sensuous pull of non-definition. Nénuphar—let it roll off your tongue, that unexpected word. Late Monet revels in when the known becomes the unexpected thing, painting from life, laying bare life’s strange pluralities.
IV.
If you do what is more formally known as Pugachev’s Cobra in a MiG-29 or any other supermaneuverable aircraft, your eyes will temporarily become a little like Monet’s in his late period. Toward the end of his life, Monet had severe cataracts. Pull enough Gs in the cockpit and your vision too, will narrow and grey out, especially in the sun. That’s why you wear a helmet and he wears a huge straw hat and, at one point, had to carefully label his palette. Ophthalmologists are, of course, prone to attributing Monet’s late style to this anatomical feature, art historians, necessarily less so. I tend to lean into trusting his agency. As the eponymous protagonist says in Top Gun: Maverick, it’s not the plane, it’s the pilot. (Which is only sort of true, both of planes and Monet; but it’s a good line though, isn’t it?)
In any event, as I’ve said before, the MiG-29 lacks HOTAS capability, so yes, the pilot does have to look down and away from scanning the sky for a second. But frankly, if you’re good enough, which was true of almost any MiG pilot at the heyday of Soviet power, you can actually do it by a kind of second-sense knowledge of the controls, a bodily awareness you can get only by putting in the hours. I trust that even before his much-delayed cataract surgery, Monet could paint mostly by feel. He knew that like a MiG pilot knows how to instantly juice the throttle while also using the targeting apparatus. Instinct means something as much in painting as in aerial combat. The momentary capture of light and the advantage of quick and accurate perception; these are the goals of both pilot and painter, to get a little ahead of the ever-moving curvature of time, with respect to which both velocity and acceleration are derivatives.
Of course, you can only almost capture the momentary, only almost get ahead of your enemy’s time for a second, but you’ll never win. At the end of Monet’s life, you see him standing in photographs in Giverny, those same lilies behind him, snared by the lens. Impressionism faced the obliteration of the camera, the theoretical ability to suddenly capture the uncapturable. Techne in technology refers to the work of the hand, but from time to time, the hand gets leapfrogged, becomes obsolete, and the shutter and the lens take over.
V.
Both American and Russian jets have long surpassed the MiG-29. The F-22 can easily do a Pugachev’s Cobra. But there are still MiG-29s in the sky—many in countries like Syria, India, and notably, Ukraine, where classical dogfighting turns out to have changed the early course of the war, destroying hundreds of Russian airforce assets with an outnumbered fleet of MiG-29E planes. Then the drones came. A bird in a jet’s engine can take out a fighter. A drone is like a bird with capability and intent. Suicide drones, almost impossible for a pilot’s naked eye to see from the cockpit, have killed several Ukrainian MiG pilots this way. They simply flew into the jet valves.
The argument arises that further investment in wildly expensive fighter jets like the F-35 might be foolhardy. The Top Gun fighting school, established specifically to counter the threat of the MiG-29’s development, might already be obsolete, because pilots themselves might be. Unmanned aircraft already surveil and drop ammunition. The camera came for Monet; the drone comes for the MiG. Although I’m still here, in a small room at MoMA full of tourists and sweat, staring at white-frothed afternoon light on a pond of lilies. There is something about the way the intangibly perfect, decadent late work touches you that a photograph of the same subject couldn’t. People still paint, and they still try to capture the ineffable, the strange moment of openness to the world and to desire. And here’s Monet, late, full of a kind of quiet bravado, hot on the throttle until the end of it, always both permanent and momentary.
If I could know what it felt like to stall and pull out of it in a MiG-29, I’d like to think it would feel a bit like this, like the mastery of a known stroke made huge and immaculate to the point of being—becoming more the stroke than the depicted thing. If I could feel gravity flatten my body into the cockpit seat, press out the lenses of my eyes, I’d like to think it would pull the rhythm of my soul up from under the water, being completely neither one thing nor the other, land nor air nor cataract. Late Monet exerts his empire without hesitation; it’s the Agapanthus at 500 km/h, screaming. He’s at your 3, your 12, you can’t see him, and then, because he can turn faster than you, because the MiG-29 is an angles fighter and Late Monet can’t be pinned as any one easy thing, always spinning, pivoting, rotating on his own axis. It’s then that you realize you’re too late, that he’s in your 6 and has pulled the trigger. If you’re lucky, you’ll feel the cockpit release and the ejector seat shoot up and jerk as the parachute kicks in. If you’re lucky, you’ll look at the sky, and it’s that mauve-grey-brown corner of paint on paint, the murk in the pond, the right edge of the rightmost panel of Water Lilies 1914–26 on the curved wall of MoMA Gallery 515, the shadow of a cloud, the setting sun, all back-reflected; your whole life is yours, beyond the bounds of jet fuel and mirrors.