Direct associations include materially perceptible qualities that underlie interpretation of a more conventional sort, including forms of patriotic reverence or war memorialization. When a restored plane points to historical relations or resembles an acknowledged prototype, these associations become part of the semiotic grounds of a struggle that is at once about what is present and what is absent, about the material and the immaterial.4 In the case of Pima, according to its director, there is a competing focus between displaying planes for military commemoration and displaying them as tokens of aeronautic history. In other words, it is not necessary that the restoration and exhibition of a flying machine glorify warfare and war preparation—other ways of interpreting planes are possible and always have been.
At the same time, this distinction between the Boneyard and its civilian surroundings threatens to reaffirm a divide between militarization and militarism, or between the material project of war (at bases and in battles, in the hands of pilots) and its cultural and ideological reckoning (at museums and in public storytelling about warriors and warfare, in the hands of civilians). In order to challenge this categorical separation between war’s conduct and its representation, I also consider how reusing and aesthetically decorating planes has been part of competing interpretations and uses of them since their earliest involvement in warfare. Here I draw inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual distinction between states and nomadic war machines, respectively, where the latter tend toward an anarchic aesthetics of singular decoration (1987, 395–403), meaning weapons are affordances that suggest open-ended uses that go beyond their designated state function (Adkins 2015, 203–10). The war machine and the state have become mutually dependent over the course of history, yet the “exteriority” of the former (its “capture” by the latter) is evident in tensions around the use and reuse of planes. The “minor art” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 401) of weapon decoration that I highlight is the frequently observed practice of nose art, where squadrons and pilots decorate their planes with iconography irreducible to mass-produced warfare and the interests of the state, which has inspired other artists affiliated with the Pima.
VARIETIES OF REUSE
What does it mean for something to be repaired or restored? This question helps to address the distinction between what goes on in the Boneyard and what goes on at Pima and related enterprises surrounding the base. Minimally, repair means that there is something broken that is being returned to a previous state of usefulness or wholeness. That previous state, which the damaged thing differs from, can be thought of as a prototype, an idea of what the thing was meant to be, or once was and could be again. A brand-new plane is not broken and in need of repair, but neither is one that has been broken down into metal scrap—the former is too close to the prototype to seem broken and the other is too far gone to be acknowledged as reparable. In its most basic sense, “Repair restores degrees of past capacity for present and future use,” in Lara Houston’s words (2017, 51). A broken thing is fixed to the extent that it more closely resembles this ideal type in the mind of the repairer, in the diagrams and instructions they refer to, according to aesthetic or functional standards they apply and so on. In practice, there can be extreme differences in degrees of repair in relation to the prototype. For example, with the new F-35, all of the components are so expensive that if a maintainer drops a tool on the wing and dings it, it has to be reported as a Class C mishap. By contrast, on an F-5 or F-18, if some component gets bent and can be pounded out it is not even reportable.
Rather than a place where disused machines are permanently dumped, the Boneyard is the open-air garage of the US military, where machines from the Air Force and all other branches are set aside, tinkered with, stripped for parts, and occasionally scrapped. These decisions ultimately depend on how the material qualities of planes are assessed and creatively manipulated. Paraphrasing Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, the repair and maintenance that goes on in the Boneyard is not incidental, rather it is part of what we might call the “engine room” (2007, 19) of permanent war-readiness. With low humidity, little rainfall, and high altitude, the site is ideal for preventing rust and corrosion. Of course, in the Arizona sun, paint peals and interiors steadily deteriorate, but this still has the desired effect of limiting the range of “different rhythms and durations of breakdown and repair action” (Houston 2017, 55). Consequently, more than four thousand aircraft are stored in these conditions and cared for, making the Boneyard the largest aircraft storage facility in the world, which is only appropriate for the largest airborne military in world history. Visitors to the Boneyard can take bus tours around the base, after showing an ID and getting past the gate attendant. And as one learns on the bus tour, they have the necessary tools for every aircraft present, in case they are put back into production. This is ultimately a cost-saving measure, allowing them to supply repaired and retooled planes on behalf of other bases and global military operations. The Boneyard is thus a repair-scape, meaning that this site and the people who work there are engaged in an ongoing process of differentiating objects, or determining the fates of their various material components in an open-ended fashion. This means saving some things, extending their usability for the time being, as well as routinely dismissing and disposing of other things.5
When done intensively, differentiation at a repair facility can beget all new forms of differentiation. Put differently, sorting and re-sorting objects can allow new qualities and new concerns to come to the fore. Shortly after World War II concluded, as a permanent war economy was being established, one notable entrepreneur in Tucson began acquiring surplus planes from the General Services Administration and melting them down. At the time, smelters were benefiting from the high price of aluminum. But sometime in the early 1950s, that operation also began restoring and collecting planes for display and sale. That business eventually became Aircraft Restoration and Marketing (ARM). ARM still exists today beside the Boneyard, with decades of accumulated knowledge related to repairing and rebuilding various aircraft. A number of other operations grew around the Boneyard, involved in experimental and virtual reuses of the landscape, whether to store objects or simulate interactions. Heading toward Phoenix, as you approach the county line, there is another site that stores commercial airplanes and airliner components. Out there in the desert Federal Law Enforcement agents train with tribal police, practicing maneuvers with cars. To the north is where scientists set up the Biosphere II initiative; after its conclusion, some recall an art display took its place: Native American “tribal masks” made from the distinct casings and flanges of nuclear weapons.
While many disused planes were ultimately scrapped for raw material, the military also practiced some preservation. Near the Boneyard, on the west side of the airport, there are still two wooden hangars left from World War II, which also used to serve as a bomb shelter during the Cold War. That the Air Force also began to preserve planes nearby is not surprising since preservation and restoration are arguably just more exaggerated forms of repair, involving further acts of differentiation. If all repair refers to some aspirational state, restoration suggests more careful standards regarding how this is to be accomplished. According to Elizabeth Spelman, “In its service to the past and the preexistent we find reasons to distinguish repairing something from creating it or replacing it, and in the conservative commitment of repair to continuity we note its difference from destruction” (2003, 126). With restoration, there is some sense that continuity itself is valuable, almost as an end in itself, an aesthetic quality quite apart from the ideal prototype associated with repair. Saying “this is a restored mansion” says as much about the virtues of restoration, of respect for aesthetic standards of design and construction for instance, as it does about the building itself. Unlike a repaired thing, however, when something is described as “restored,” this does not necessarily mean it can be used as it once was.
Some of the Pima museums planes are reclaimed by others and fly again. This is because museum objects are not deprived of use value or authenticity, but somehow saved and redeemed from a rubbish state.6 When staff at the Pima museum “restore” a plane for display, this does not necessarily mean that it is capable of flight, however, only that it looks like it did when it could fly. This is what ultimately divides the Boneyard from neighboring preservation and restoration operations. According to a brief, unpublished history written by James, director of collections and aircraft restoration at
