Bertram Brooker and the Toronto School of Communication

Abstract

As editor of Marketing magazine in the mid-1920s, the Toronto-based artist, author and advertising executive Bertram Brooker (1888–1955) 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 1921–1955, and an indirect influence on the Toronto School of Communication.

Temporality as Bergsonian Critique in the Advertising and Visual Art of Bertram Brooker

“…The artist-advertiser's inclusion of a simplified representation of a pipe organ in that composition situates his decomposition of the body into a series of vectors-likely signifying the "divergent directions" (bergson, 1998, p. 99) of the élan vitalagainst the same backdrop of sensory adaptation to non-visual stimuli as his earlier cartoon for Marketing. both images reveal parallels with his coeval exploration of synesthetic strategies in texts for Marketing that attempted to revamp print media by capitalizing on the radio craze of the 1920s (Lauder, 2012). Yet the musical allusions of these works likely also reflect bergson's repeated invocation of "melody" as a metaphor for the (qualitative and evolutionary) continuity and multiplicity of duration:…”

“…Lydiatt at the close of 1927 investigated the possibility that "ink and paper [could] stimulate the palate or … cause the mind to 'auditionize' unheard sounds in the same way that it 'visualizes' unseen sights" (Ting, 1929, p. 212). Lauder (2012) has argued that brooker's exploration of the potential for print media to simulate auditory effects under conditions of intensified competition for advertising dollars generated by the new medium of radio suggests analogies with the musical allusions of his contemporary abstract paintings, such as Abstraction-Music (c. 1927), Chorale (Bach) (c. 1927), andToccata (c. 1927).…”

“…Gregory betts (2013) has recently proposed parallels between brooker's "vortex of art, media, and advertising" and Lewis' discourse on technology and mass culture (p. 217). Lauder (2012) earlier noted that Time and Western Man influenced Harold Innis' discourse on time and modernity, with which brooker's critical project likewise shares much in common (see also Watson, 2006). The resonance between articulations of time found in the work of brooker, Lewis, and later Innis speaks to the common currency of bergsonian rhetoric in what Paul Tiessen (1993) has termed the "pre-McLuhan body Canadian media theory" of the 1920s through the 1940s.…”

“…Previous commentators have detected the influence of Henri bergson on brooker's advertising writings and visual art (see Lauder, 2006Lauder, , 2010Lauder, , 2012Luff, 1991;Zemans, 1989). The artist-advertiser's celebration of "becoming" and "flux" in his marketing texts of the 1920s, in particular, is visualized by his abstract canvases, the first to be exhibited in a solo exhibition in Canada, and innovative graphic designs.…”

“…However, it was betts (2005) who first recognized that Layout Technique is primarily concerned with spatial concerns of the type studied by Cavell, whereas Copy Technique "organized its arguments around conceptions of time" (p. 247).This conceptual division of labour foreshadows the space/time dualism that structures the late communications writings of Harold Innis. Adam Lauder (2012) has explored the possibility that brooker may have served as an indirect influence on Innis. Yet, though Lauder briefly discussed the shared commitment to cultural continuity and the "oral tradition" disclosed by the writings of brooker and later Innis, the bulk of his analysis is devoted to an investigation of the possibility that the artist-advertiser's visualizations (in the form of innovative charts and maps) may have contributed to the political economist's early interest in the formative influence of geography on the development of a "staples" economy in Canada as well as his subsequent theorization of (neo-)colonial "monopolies of space.…”