ABSTRACT
This chapter delves into the sensual material forms of mass media communication. It highlights the formalist orientation adopted by several London artists who keenly explored the visual climate in which they worked. From Cinemascope, the images of magazine pages, to advertising photography, they explored the techniques and presentation methods of visual media with a keen eye on the senses issued by mass media images. Hamilton's ‘tabular image’ is representative of an avant-gardist impulse towards identifying the ‘plastic dialects’ of visual communication. His reflexive writing on the formal decisions made for painting and collage indexes an aesthetic orientation with which fine art images (often labelled under Pop art) are employed as a site for parsing out or enacting the idioms of ‘popular art’. The chapter examines such aesthetic impulses by looking at how a number of artists employed specific vocabularies (e.g. scale, pace, and visual ambience) to describe visual forms found in the mass media, as well as the ways in which they get assimilated into the making of fine art images. The chapter bridges formal connections between the styles and techniques of mass communication and shared cultural senses that procure the sensual form of culture.
