As editor of Marketing magazine in the mid-1920s, the Toronto-based artist, author and advertising executive Bertram Brooker (18881955) introduced new techniques of market research to Canadian readers and elaborated innovative analyses of advertising as a synesthetic media system. Brooker’s writings on markets are explored as a possible influence on Harold Adams Innis’s research on economic staples and the social production of space as well as on Marshall McLuhan’s early writings on market research and mass affect. Brooker’s writings on radio and synesthesia are compared with McLuhan’s later writings on shifting sense ratios. Brooker is posited as a leading contributor to the sensuous media culture of Toronto circa 19211955, and an indirect influence on the Toronto School of Communication.
health sciences, history THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW utpjournals.press/chr Offering a comprehensive analysis on the events that have shaped Canada, CHR publishes articles that examine Canadian history from both a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective.
This essay re-evaluates the disavowed relationship between the advertising career and colour field paintings of the Canadian artist Jack Bush (1909-77). Bush’s belated transition out of the world of graphic design uniquely equipped him to fulfill the efforts of the American formalist critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) to buttress the remnants of the historical avant-garde through a strategic rationalization of pop cultural forms and commercial techniques. The resulting co-optation reflected transformations in the Canadian advertising industry during the 1960s, which mirrored developments in the United States in accommodating the symbols of popular protest movements to re-entrench establishment interests. The resemblance between certain late paintings by Bush and the conventions of psycho-medical modelling and other graphic instruments deployed by Madison Avenue researchers troubles uncritical readings of the formalist agenda usually said to have informed these artworks.
In an economy that increasingly trades in electronic information products, the copy assumes a new reversibility, as a figure at once valued for its rapid exchangeability and vilified for of its associations with counterfeit and fraud. The incorporation of confidence measures into the
design of electronic information products is symptomatic of a primary crisis of belief installed within empiricist epistemologies, of which anti-circumvention technologies and knock-off economies are merely the incorrigible children. The aesthetic strategies practiced by Albert Oehlen and
N.E. Thing Co., which mirror the information hiding techniques employed by steganography software and technologies of trust as well as the circumvention tactics employed to defeat them, register an emergent preoccupation in contemporary visual culture with structures of belief. They also disclose
a Humean attention to processes of devivification, which figures in these artists’ work as an effect of the multiplication of the same. The trope of the ‘false bottom’ deployed in the 1930s novels of British artist and author Wyndham Lewis serves as intertext in this genealogical
investigation of the politics of circumvention.
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