Jan Sawka’s Screen Play

Abstract

In 1982 the Polish American artist Jan Sawka executed an extraordinary painting, 15 Strange Things on the Clean Morning Sky. Contradicting the title, the sky depicted is covered with sketches and cryptic writing. This suggests a common hallucinatory experience had by pilots navigating an empty sky, the ganzfeld effect. When vision encounters any undifferentiated field, such as total darkness, it will create something to see, in the form of hallucinations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has asserted that hallucination is an integral part of visual perception: it is a kind of preseeing, which Jacques Lacan calls the screen. For Lacan, the screen is a “locus of mediation” between actual perceptions and the expectations or models that shape our seeing; it works without any conscious awareness on our part. This is not so with the “15 strange things” of Sawka’s title: small, framed images in a dusky cluster near the top of the painting. Their subjects reflect three modes in which conscious thought is conceived out of the torrent of visual impressions: diagrams, words, and clouds. Sawka plays with the screen in various ways, making it visible in other works of his. His preoccupation with the nature of seeing is not confined to images from the material world but has implications as well for memory, fiction, and painting itself—since a canvas is also a screen.