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ADAM LAUDER |\u00a0UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO<\/p>\n
TIME SAVERS:
\nBERTRAM BROOKER AND THE POLITICS OF TIME AND MATERIAL CULTURE<\/h4>\n
T<\/span>he\u00a0art and advertising of Bertram Brooker (1888-1955) stands at the head of a distinctively Canadian discourse on the \u201cpolitics of time\u201d and material culture (see Antliff). Even prior to purchasing the Toronto-based Marketing <\/em>magazine in November 1924, Brooker had initiated a critical dialogue with dominant advertising culture in the pages of the leading American trade paper, Printers\u2019 Ink<\/em>, that built upon the arguments of Henri Bergson. Drawing on the French philosopher\u2019s popular texts \u201cLaughter\u201d and Creative Evolution<\/em>, Brooker pitted the \u201cflux\u201d of Bergson\u2019s non-rational conception of temporality as dur\u00e9e <\/em>against the static, spatial bias of American \u201creason-why\u201d copy and its behaviourist construction of consumer subjectivity (see Surrey, \u201cMaking Orders\u201d; Surrey, \u201cAre Statistics\u201d; Spane, \u201cMake Advertising\u201d; Johnston; Luff; Lauder, \u201cIt\u2019s Alive!\u201d). In retrospect, this dualistic framework can be recognized as having set the stage for Canadian political economist Harold Innis\u2019s subsequent \u201cplea for time\u201d in the face of what he viewed as a neo-imperialistic American culture industry in the 1950s. Brooker\u2019s innovative advertising writings and cubo-futurist visual art and graphic designs of the 1920s celebrated qualitative \u201cbecoming\u201d in a fashion recalling the earlier Bergsonian modernisms of European Futurist, Vorticist, and Rhythmist movements, but adapted to the struggle for Canadian cultural and economic sovereignty (c.f. Brooker, \u201cHow American\u201d; see also Dyer, \u201cWhy We Buy\u201d; Love, \u201cC.N.R.\u201d).<\/p>\n This article examines a related but as of yet largely overlooked dimension of the Toronto artist-advertiser\u2019s writings and visual art: namely their harnessing of Bergsonian constructions of temporality to critique the institutions and instruments of modernity, particularly the media of communication. Clearing a path for the analyses of space subsequently articulated by Toronto School theorists including Innis and Marshall McLuhan, Brooker\u2019s post-1929 graphic designs, visual art, and writings revisit his earlier valorization of flux to explore the limits of media and modernization. Some of the strategies developed by the artist-advertiser to mount this critical project resonate with the earlier experiments of the Canadian-born British artist-author Wyndham Lewis. However, in stark contrast to the ultra-conservative political trajectory Lewis pursued during the same period, the 1930s saw Brooker increasingly seize upon the socialist potential of Bergsonian temporality as a meditation on the plight of those left behind by technological progress amidst the deprivations of the Great Depression. Subsequently, in the 1940s and 1950s, Brooker\u2019s writings revisited Bergson\u2019s theories, but in a speculative vein that reveals a deepening awareness of the dangers implied by unchecked spatial ambitions.<\/p>\n This article performs the first close reading of specific artifacts of material culture produced by Brooker during the 1930s, notably illustrations published in the socialist magazine The Canadian Forum<\/em>, as well as the late unpublished manuscript, The Brave Voices <\/em>(ca. 1953-55)\u2014a magisterial summa <\/em>of his Bergsonian insights on media and modernity. This assessment of Brooker\u2019s meditations on the shifting politics of time and material culture spanning the Depression years through the postwar period will also provide an opportunity to test Gregory Betts\u2019s recent characterization of Brooker as a \u201cCanadian Vorticist\u201d (see Avant-garde <\/em>215-16).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Biography<\/strong><\/p>\n Brooker was a British-born multimedia modernist whose diverse achievements negotiated avant-garde developments in Europe and the growing influence of the American culture industry from a distinctly Canadian position of marginality. After emigrating with his family to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba in 1905, the future artist-advertiser worked as a timekeeper for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway prior to opening a cinema with his brother in nearby Neepawa. This experience as a movie house operator likely acted as a catalyst for the scenarios he penned in 1912-13 that were adapted into a series of silent films by the Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Company of America, starring Maurice Costello as the eponymous sleuth Lambert Chase (see Lauder, \u201cIt\u2019s Alive!\u201d \u00a096, 104n93). Brooker\u2019s early participation in film culture likely contributed to his later exploration of time-based forms in his texts and visual art. In parallel with this activity as a screenwriter, Brooker undertook work as a journalist and commercial artist for a variety of prairie papers, eventually becoming Promotion Manager for the Winnipeg Free Press<\/em>. He also wrote a regular humour and traffic column for the latter publication, \u201cGasograms by Honk,\u201d whose free-ranging musings on art and current events anticipated the studied scattershot quality of McLuhan\u2019s analyses.<\/p>\n In 1921, Brooker moved to Toronto to work as a regular contributor to the advertising trade paper Marketing and Business Management<\/em>, which he later purchased. In 1923, Marketing <\/em>published Brooker\u2019s first monograph, Subconscious Selling<\/em>. This recently rediscovered title applied techniques of \u201cautosuggestion\u201d developed by the French pharmacist \u00c9mile Cou\u00e9\u2014progenitor of the popular mantra \u201cDay by day, in every way, I\u2019m getting better and better\u201d (Brooks 28)\u2014to practical problems in salesmanship (see Lauder, \u201cBertram Brooker\u2019s Practice-based Advertising Theory\u201d). The text is significant, in part, for its adaptation of Bergsonian concepts and vocabulary to its presentation of Cou\u00e9ist psychology for a non-specialist audience. This Bergsonian inflection set the stage for Brooker\u2019s full-fledged writings on Bergson for Marketing <\/em>and other journals later in the decade. As editor and publisher of Marketing <\/em>from 1924 until the close of 1927, Brooker explored a Bergsonian \u201cmetaphysics of media\u201d (Crocker), experimenting with synesthetic alternatives to established print conventions that also responded to the radio craze that swept Canadian consumers beginning in 1922 (see Weir). Brooker\u2019s multimodal media investigations in the pages of Marketing<\/em> identify him as a key precursor of the auditory paradigm enshrined in Toronto School communications theory. In 1927, Brooker was the subject of Canada\u2019s first solo exhibition of abstract art\u2014likewise inspired by auditory concerns (see Williams)\u2014sponsored by Group of Seven members Arthur Lismer and Lawren Harris at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto (see Reid).<\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s prolific writings for Marketing <\/em>and the American business journal Printers\u2019 Ink<\/em> were revised and compiled in two influential volumes issued by McGraw-Hill: Layout Technique in Advertising <\/em>(1929) and Copy Technique in Advertising <\/em>(1930) (see Cavell; Willmott). Following a period of freelance work, Brooker returned to the advertising world in 1930, accepting a position with the prestigious firm of J.J. Gibbons as head of the first media and research department in Canada (Johnston 210). Brooker then moved to MacLaren Advertising in 1934, where he retired as vice-president in the year of his death.<\/p>\n The resoundingly negative response to Brooker\u2019s pioneering 1927 exhibition likely encouraged his turn away from abstraction and generally lower public profile of later years. Nonetheless he continued to exhibit and publish throughout the 1930s and 1940s, being awarded with the first Governor General\u2019s Award for Fiction in 1937 (then named the Lord Tweedsmuir Award) for his novel Think of the Earth<\/em>. Despite perceptions of diminished radicalism, unexhibited canvases and unpublished manuscripts from Brooker\u2019s archives and estate attest to a relentless spirit of experimentation and inquiry. Yet, though a respected member of Toronto\u2019s advertising, art, and literary communities, since his death in 1955 the overall trajectory of Brooker\u2019s multidisciplinary achievements and broader contributions to Canadian culture remained elusive until recent, revisionist studies.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cService Products\u201d and the Ambivalent Politics of Time-Saving<\/strong><\/p>\n Electric power, equally available in the farmhouse and the Executive Suite, permits any place to be a centre, and does not require large aggregations. This reverse pattern appeared quite early in electrical \u2018labour-saving\u2019 devices, whether toaster or washing machine or vacuum cleaner. Instead of saving work, these devices permit everybody to do his own work. What the nineteenth century had delegated to servants and housemaids we now do for ourselves. This principle applies in toto <\/em>in the electric age.(36).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In the above passage from Understanding Media<\/em>, Marshall McLuhan draws attention to the ambivalent legacy of technologies marketed as labour-saving devices; for example, an unintended consequence of products such as the vacuum cleaner is the transformation of leisure-seeking consumers into harried self-service providers. Despite embracing James Joyce\u2019s participatory dictum, \u201cmy consumers, are they not also my producers?\u201d (The Gutenberg Galaxy <\/em>205), as a model for his own theorization of reader reception as a process of creative \u201cmaking,\u201d McLuhan was markedly less optimistic in his comments on \u201cservice products\u201d\u2014technologies intended to replace human labour that, as Jonathan Gershuny observes, paradoxically contributed to a \u201cself-service economy\u201d (81; see also Webster 51). This contradiction instantiates an abiding paradox in Toronto School communication theory, which simultaneously valorizes time as a dialogical counter to the alleged spatial bias of the American culture industries (see Comor; Zhao), but criticizes the effects of time-saving technologies and time-binding media such as radio for contributing to everything from the Great Depression and World War II to the post-war rise of an oppressive service economy. In some ways, these tensions anticipate recent critiques of the creative economy (see Boltanski and \u00c8ve Chiapelo), thereby complicating representations of McLuhan in particular as a na\u00efve proselytizer of an exploitive cognitive capitalism.<\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s marketing texts and graphic designs articulate a similarly ambivalent discourse on time-based media and time-saving technologies, as both potential instruments of social redemption and \u201cdestroyers\u201d of established social patterns. This anticipatory quality of Brooker\u2019s oeuvre <\/em>is partly explained by a shared encounter with Bergson (see Cavell; Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan<\/em>; Darroch and Marchessault). Clearing a path for McLuhan\u2019s commentary on time-savers more than 30 years later, Brooker\u2019s analysis of an advertisement for Hoover vacuum cleaners (Fig. 1) in his 1929 McGraw-Hill textbook, Layout Technique in Advertising<\/em>, singles out the iconic labour-saver as bringing into representation a Bergsonian \u201cworld made up of \u2018events,\u2019 rather than of objects\u201d (174). Discussing the composition of the Hoover ad, in which a vacuum is encircled by its cord with numeric bullets distributed to suggest a clock face, Booker comments: \u201c[S<\/em>]omething has happened <\/em>to this circle. It is broken, and leads into a series <\/em>of curves which are extremely active. They are going somewhere and doing something. In other words, these curves are \u2018events\u2019 rather than \u2018forms\u2019\u201d (176). This analysis follows on the heels of an unlikely commentary on Albert Einstein and Oswald Spengler as the heralds of a new conception of the \u201cworld-as-history\u201d (174). Such seemingly tangential excursions into philosophy and physics are commonplace in Brooker\u2019s writings, whose astonishing transdisciplinarity anticipates the media experiments of McLuhan and Edward Carpenter\u2019s Explorations group of the 1950s (see Darroch and Marchessault).<\/p>\n Figure 1. The Hoover Company, \u201cPositive Agitation,\u201d in Layout Technique, 1929.<\/p><\/div>\n The optimistic rhetoric of Brooker\u2019s Bergsonian reading of the Hoover ad parallels his comments in a March, 1929 piece for Marketing<\/em>, \u201cVisualize Events\u2014Not Things in Advertising Copy.\u201d Similarly drawing on the physics of Einstein and employing a Bergsonian vocabulary of \u201cflux,\u201d \u201cstream\u201d and \u201cvortex,\u201d Brooker defines the successful advertisement as the projection of \u201cthe universe as a flux of energy\u201d (161). Unsurprisingly, Brooker\u2019s own graphic designs and abstract paintings (the first to be shown in a solo exhibition in Canada) employ a geometric vocabulary that, in the words of Joyce Zemans, communicates qualities of \u201crhythmic biomorphic energy and flow\u201d redolent of Bergson\u2019s dur\u00e9e<\/em> (30). A representative series of ads designed by Brooker for the national daily The Globe<\/em> ran in the fall of 1928. Echoing his gloss on the Hoover ad in Layout Technique<\/em>, Brooker employs stylized clock faces in tandem with geometric motifs to represent the product as \u201ca happening\u201d (Spane, \u201cVisualize Events\u201d 162).<\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s exploration of Futurist principles of dynamism, energy, and flux in his writings, graphic designs, and visual art of the 1920s was abruptly cut short by the stock market crash of October, 1929. A meeting in the summer of that year with the Winnipeg artist Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956) is usually cited as the impetus for the subsequent sea change in Brooker\u2019s art practice, which saw him switch to a realist style reminiscent of the Precisionism of the American Charles Sheeler. However, it is likely that the pressures affecting Brooker\u2019s production were as much economic as aesthetic, the artist-advertiser having returned to full-time employment in 1930 after working for several years as a freelancer.<\/p>\n Figure 2. Bertram Brooker, \u201cVacuum Cleaner,\u201d in The Canadian Forum, July 1936.<\/p><\/div>\n Figure 3. Bertram Brooker, \u201cLawn Mower,\u201d in The Canadian Forum, November 1936.<\/p><\/div>\n Dennis Reid notes that as the 1930s progressed, Brooker revisited abstraction, but in a more restrained, Cubist style. However, two drawings published in The Canadian Forum<\/em> in July and November 1936 stand out from Brooker\u2019s relatively placid production of that turbulent decade: Vacuum Cleaner <\/em>(1936) and Lawn Mower <\/em>(1936) (Figs. 2 & 3)\u2014though formally similar to the contemporaneous canvases Blue Nude <\/em>(1937) and Entombment <\/em>(1937)\u2014are distinguished by their fusion of consumer products and geometric abstraction, a strategy recalling Brooker\u2019s advertisements for The Globe<\/em> nearly a decade earlier. Yet these are not advertisements; in their use of unconventional perspective, they match Charles Hill\u2019s description of domestic still-life works by Brooker from the same years, such as Ski Poles <\/em>(1936): \u201cThe arbitrary perspective projects the objects forward,\u201d states Hill, \u201ccreating a vertical as well as horizontal progression\u201d (94). However, unlike Ski Poles<\/em>, Vacuum Cleaner <\/em>and Lawn Mower <\/em>do not depict the \u201ctypically Canadian subject matter\u201d of winter sport (94). The drawings\u2019 inclusion in the pages of the The Canadian Forum<\/em>\u2014which Hill characterizes as the \u201cmouthpiece for the League for Social Reconstruction and the C.C.F. (Commonwealth Cooperative Federation, forerunner of the New Democratic Party)\u201d and a forum for the discussion of Marxist topics\u2014is, on a first reading, all the more puzzling. What are these drawings, seemingly glorifying the products of the very capitalist system habitually criticized by Forum <\/em>contributors, doing rubbing shoulders with articles on Soviet Russia and the Spanish Civil War?<\/p>\n Despite the \u201csurprise\u201d with which Hill greets Brooker\u2019s socially committed stance of the 1930s\u2014seeing it as an aberration in a career otherwise devoted to \u201cindividual aesthetic expression\u201d (15, 16)\u2014Anna Hudson\u2019s dissertation places Brooker squarely within a \u201csocially-conscious modern movement of painting in Canada\u201d (\u201cArt and Social Progress\u201d 33). Yet, while firmly locating Brooker within a milieu that included such known socialists as Paraskeva Clark, Hudson has more recently admitted that, \u201c[m]y attempts to read social consciousness into Canadian painting of the 1930s and 1940s ended in frustration: what, after all, is political or propagandistic about works like Bertram Brooker\u2019s Still Life with Bag No. 3 <\/em>[\u2026]?\u201d (\u201cTime and Image\u201d 56). Where Hudson\u2019s recent scholarship proposes to wrest a progressive agenda from Brooker\u2019s work by situating his exploration of time and space within a discourse on \u201cscientific humanism\u201d (ibid. 58), I argue that the artist\u2019s social consciousness emerges, rather, from his Bergsonian critique of scientific progress and modernization.<\/p>\n If this anti-triumphalist stance is more opaque in visual works such as Brooker\u2019s illustrations for The Canadian Forum<\/em>, Gregory Betts has lucidly demonstrated that the artist\u2019s coeval works of short fiction draw attention to the social consequences of rapid modernization: \u201chis characters,\u201d writes Betts, \u201care distinctly ill-suited to handle the unique pressures of modernity\u201d (\u201cIntroduction\u201d xxx). \u201cMrs. Hungerford\u2019s Milk,\u201d published in a 1934 issue of The Canadian Forum <\/em>between articles on Marxism and the state of the labour movement, narrates the plight of farmer Joe Snell, who refuses to bow to the pressures of \u201ckeeping up to date\u201d by upgrading his farm equipment (138). This poignant allegory of technological dependency may have been an oblique response to an earlier Forum <\/em>article by the Winnipeg Journalist Leonard Hungerford. In \u201cThe Consumer Listens In,\u201d Hungerford reported on a meeting of parliament early in the premiership of R.B. Bennett:<\/p>\n I was the consumer and I was listening in. For three hours I listened and watched. I became convinced that I\u2019d pay more for good fruit and for first-class butter, suspicious that I\u2019d pay more for good clothes and good shoes, and was made to entertain the surmise that perhaps I\u2019d have more money with which to pay more. And as for the farmer\u2026. I decided to hurry home to ask Alice in Wonderland <\/em>about the farmer. (93)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Hungerford\u2019s adoption of the consumer\u2019s perspective as a political lens undoubtedly would have been have resonant for Brooker, whose writings on advertising topics were among the first in North America to articulate themes that would later cohere in the \u201cConsumer\u2019s Movement\u201d of the 1930s (see Bartels 52, 59). Brooker\u2019s advertising texts of the 1920s exhorted the copywriter to adopt a participatory tone that would recast the manipulative valence of the conventional sales pitch as participatory interaction. However, as Betts\u2019s gloss on Brooker\u2019s short fiction suggests, by the following decade the theme of consumption had assumed a more politically ambivalent cast in the artist\u2019s writings. The new truck that Joe Snell\u2019s brother urges him to purchase in \u201cMrs. Hungerford\u2019s Milk\u201d is as much a symbol of the protagonist\u2019s failure to adapt to the pressures of modernity as a potential agent of \u201ctechnological revolution\u201d (Betts, \u201cIntroduction\u201d xxix). A similarly conflicted picture of the legacies of modernization and of the Bergsonian politics of \u201ccreativity\u201d promulgated by his advertising texts of the 1920s emerges from Brooker\u2019s poem \u201cThe Destroyer,\u201d penned on the eve of the Depression, an excerpt of which is reproduced below:<\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0what have I to do with creating When viewed within the transformed perspective on the commodity that emerges from Betts\u2019s reading of Brooker\u2019s Depression-era short fiction, the artist\u2019s illustrations of consumer goods for The Canadian Forum <\/em>assume radically new meanings as critical appropriations of material culture that comment on the unintended social effects of technological progress. I argue that this strategy suggests analogies with the tactics developed earlier by British Vorticist artists.<\/p>\n The bold typography and sensational language of the Vorticist little magazine Blast<\/em> (1914-15) seized upon the potential of advertising to function as what Andrew Wernick (qtd. in Reynolds) terms \u201crhetorical form\u201d (240). Building on the earlier promotional strategies of Italian Futurists such as F.T. Marinetti, but appropriating the products of British mass culture, Blast <\/em>staged a \u201cvisual text\u201d targeting the pretensions of the Royal Academy as well as the social disengagement of foreign avant-gardes (Tuma 403; see also Reynolds 244). Rather than critiquing the institution of advertising per se<\/em>, the Vorticists positioned the artist as \u201ca creature of the media\u201d (Klein 137).<\/p>\n Figure 4. Bertram Brooker, The Romance of Trade Marks, ca. 1912-1915. Ink on paper, 21.5 x 27.8 cm. Courtesy The Robert McLaughlin Gallery.<\/p><\/div>\n Figure 5. Bertram Brooker, Reznor, ca. 1912-1915. Ink on paper, 21.5 x 27.7 cm. Courtesy The Robert McLaughlin Gallery.<\/p><\/div>\n While Wyndham Lewis, the ringmaster of this media circus, would develop into a notorious critic of advertising and other ideological instruments of liberal democracy in the wake of the devastation wrought by World War I (see Rosenquist 61), Tuma underlines that, \u201cBlast <\/em>marks a moment\u2014important to recover now that the situation has changed so\u2014when it did not occur to avant-gardists to pit their work against popular culture\u201d (403). An allied vision of a utopian merger of art and advertising emerges from early drawings by Brooker dating from the same period as Blast<\/em>. Executed during his years in Neepawa, Manitoba (Zemans 18), ink drawings such as The Romance of Trademarks <\/em>(ca. 1912-15) and Reznor <\/em>(ca. 1912-15) (Figs. 4 & 5) harness the artist\u2019s growing command of graphic design\u2014acquired through his work as an illustrator for newspapers in Neepawa, Regina and Winnipeg\u2014to collage commercial trademarks into intricate avant-garde compositions. While Betts dubs the related drawing, Decadent <\/em>(ca. 1912-15), a \u201cvisual poem\u201d (Avant-garde <\/em>132), Brooker\u2019s explorations of advertising as an aesthetic medium are clearly linked to a contemporaneous body of drawings and watercolours likewise housed today in the archives of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, including The Cult of Ugliness<\/em>, which Zemans reads as responding to press coverage of the Chicago installation of the 1913 Armory Show (18).<\/p>\n Several writers, preeminently Betts, have suggested a Vorticist influence on Brooker\u2019s multi-media production. Brooker\u2019s direct references to Lewis confirm the Canadian artist\u2019s familiarity with the movement\u2019s chief spokesperson by the time that the latter\u2019s anti-advertising polemic Time and Western Man<\/em> appeared in 1927 (\u201cBlake\u201d; \u201cProphets Wanted\u201d). An earlier point of contact is not out of the question; Blast <\/em>had Canadian distribution through Bell & Cockburn, the Toronto agent of publisher John Lane (see Lauder, \u201cIt\u2019s Alive!\u201d 102n35). Whether or not The Romance of Trademarks <\/em>and Reznor <\/em>reveal a direct Vorticist influence, they deploy strategies reminiscent of avant-garde little magazines to engage in a proto-Pop discourse on the rapprochement of high and low cultural forms paralleling Vorticist artists\u2019 coeval valorization of material culture as \u201cthe real national art\u201d (Tuma 405). Brooker\u2019s Blast<\/em>-like manifesto, \u201cThe Decay of Art\u201d (ca. 1912-15), gives literary expression to the integration of material culture and avant-gardism visualized in these drawings in a fashion recalling Vorticism\u2019s strategic inhabitation of popular culture:<\/p>\n Commercialism is developing the minds of thousands who were once serfs, and \u00a0creating a new race, such as Mr. H.G. Wells anticipates will be the strength and stay of the New Republic. Commercialism is linking art with life, and giving every man an occupation worth living for. (n. pag.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Brooker\u2019s Vorticist-like embrace of commercial culture in this early text looks forward to McLuhan\u2019s critique of the high-cultural pretentions of the 1951 Massey Report in Counterblast<\/em>: his homage to Lewis\u2019s irreverent fusion of popular and avant-garde forms in Blast <\/em>(see also Stanners).<\/p>\n The optimistic embrace of advertising that characterizes Brooker\u2019s Neepawa drawings has evaporated from his illustrations for The Canadian Forum <\/em>of two decades later. Encountered within the context of the journal\u2019s solemn tone of social criticism, the drawings\u2019 residual qualities of Bergsonian dynamism now read as sarcasm. In a dialectical move recalling Lewis\u2019s harnessing of Bergson\u2019s dualism to stage oppositional dramas that Paul Edwards interprets as allegories of \u201cdynamism [\u2026] blocked by the sheer recalcitrance of matter\u201d (43), Brooker\u2019s Canadian Forum <\/em>illustrations express a socially motivated comic turn. As early as February 1924, Brooker had explored Bergson\u2019s theorization of the comic as the mechanistic complement to the \u00e9lan vital<\/em> in \u201cLaughter\u201d as a possible resource to advertisers (see Surrey, \u201cMaking Orders\u201d). Yet the biting social critique of advertising and the limits of technological progress and its claims of time-saving to which Brooker yokes Bergsonian comedy in his Canadian Forum <\/em>illustrations is completely foreign to the celebration of vitalist temporality that dominated his commercial designs and marketing texts of the 1920s. If Brooker\u2019s appeals to Bergson during the boom years of the 1920s are representative of the \u201cqualitative time\u201d identified by Harry Harootunian as a widespread interwar reaction to the industrial schedules of modernity (479-80), his Canadian Forum <\/em>illustrations explore the critical possibilities of the French philosopher\u2019s conceptualization of the comic as embodying the material limits of creative evolution.<\/p>\n The implosion of vitalist temporality visualized by the Bergsonian comedy of Brooker\u2019s Canadian Forum <\/em>interventions resembles the winnowing horizon of expectation that confronts characters like Joe Snell in his short fiction of the same period. Much as the new truck that Snell refuses to purchase simultaneously symbolizes the advertising industry\u2019s hollow rhetoric of organic temporality and the rewards of modernization denied those unable to afford the price, Brooker\u2019s Vacuum Cleaner <\/em>and Lawn Mower <\/em>embody both the limits of progress and advertising\u2019s false aura of vitality.<\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s questioning of the modernist ideology of progress is even more overt in his 1939 painting The Recluse <\/em>(Fig. 6), in which the defiant gaze of a vagabond confronts the viewer. The drab clothing of the gaunt figure contrasts sharply with the iconography of progress and electric palette of the background: a receding line of telephone poles, whose cruciform outlines conjure the salvational drama of Golgotha, that seems to represent all the benefits of modernity that have been denied the social outcast. It is significant that Brooker has chosen telephone wires\u2014symbols of the same nexus of empire and communications of which his own work in advertising was an increasingly integral component in Canada\u2014to visualize the limits of modernity, thereby implicating this late painting within the same discourse on advertising, modernity, and time as the artist\u2019s lesser-known, but no less poignant, illustrations for The Canadian Forum<\/em>.<\/p>\n Figure 6. Bertram Brooker, The Recluse, 1939. Oil on canvas, 61 x 45.7 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Walter Klinkhoff, 1978.3. Photo courtesy MMFA.<\/p><\/div>\n The shift in Brooker\u2019s perspective on commerce and technology, from the optimism of his early Neepawa drawings to the relative pessimism of Vacuum Cleaner<\/em>, Lawn Mower<\/em>, and The Recluse<\/em>, to some extent parallels the fluctuating trajectory of Lewis\u2019s relationship to advertising during the same period. Although Betts downplays the disparity, Rosenquist notes the contradictory character of the pre- and post-war Vorticist, observing that, \u201cthe two Lewises are difficult to reconcile\u201d (34). If the early Lewis of Blast <\/em>held out hope that the inspired leadership of the avant-garde artist could stimulate social transformation through a strategic redeployment of advertising and other popular forms, by 1919 the artist-author had begun to reverse this position (see Foshay). In The Caliph\u2019s Design <\/em>Lewis chastised the post-war output of fellow modernists, including Picasso, for degenerating into a mere \u201creflection of fashion\u201d (Rosenquist 43). This theme was subsequently taken up at greater length in Time and Western Man<\/em>, in which the target of the British artist-author\u2019s critique of mass culture shifted from fashion to advertising.<\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s writings of the 1930s document the Canadian\u2019s reception of Lewis\u2019s contributions to the post-war debate on high and low culture as a conflict of \u201ctime versus space,\u201d in which advertising and fashion are identified as symptoms of a Bergsonian \u201ctime cult\u201d threatening the classical foundations of Western culture (Rosenquist 54). The plot of Brooker\u2019s 1936 potboiler, The Tangled Miracle<\/em>, reprises this Lewisian attitude of media skepticism. As Betts has noted, Brooker\u2019s foray into detective fiction explores newspapers\u2019 manipulation of a gullible public (\u201c\u2018The Destroyer\u2019\u201d 138, 159\u201362). The work of Brooker and Lewis thus traces a common path from what Rosenquist has dubbed a pre-war \u201chigh modernism involved in marketing itself\u201d (7) to a more critical stance with respect to the effects of mass media on behaviours and perception.<\/p>\n Despite these affinities, Brooker\u2019s writings and visual art of the 1930s reflect an ongoing commitment to the very Bergsonian theory so vehemently repudiated by the later Lewis. Yet Brooker\u2019s deployment of Bergsonian tropes of temporality during the 1930s was tempered by a newfound attention to the deeper critical dimensions of the French philosopher\u2019s paradigm that was likely sharpened by the Canadian\u2019s reading of Lewis. Somewhat paradoxically, the artist\u2019s exposure to the hardships of the Depression years encouraged a commitment to social justice, reflected in his contributions to The Canadian Forum<\/em>, that was antithetical to Lewis\u2019s growing elitism and flirtation with fascist politics during the same period.<\/p>\n The crypto-socialism of Brooker\u2019s art and writings of the 1930s was obscured by the delayed reception of his earlier celebration of flux by his chief critics, socialist politician Frank Underhill and painter Paraskeva Clark. \u201c[T]here is not much sign,\u201d wrote Underhill in a scathing review of Brooker\u2019s 1936 Yearbook of the Arts in Canada<\/em>, \u201cthat Canadian artists have been moved by the phenomenon of a civilization dissolving before their eyes\u201d (27). Clark and Underhill\u2019s high-profile debate with Brooker\u2019s associate and apologist, sculptor Elizabeth Wyn Wood, in the pages of The Canadian Forum <\/em>and New Frontier <\/em>in 1936-37, looked back to the ideology of progress promoted by Brooker\u2019s work of the 1920s. If the pre-Crash glorification of financial boom criticized by Underhill is epitomized by a 1929 ad for The Globe<\/em> designed by Brooker that celebrates the newspaper medium as a clear \u201cdividing line between above-the-average and below-the-average families\u201d (19), subsequent works such as Lawn Mower<\/em>, The Recluse <\/em>and Vacuum Cleaner<\/em> reveal a newfound social conscience to which both Clark and Underhill were oblivious.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s Spatial Critique<\/strong><\/p>\n In counterpoint to the socialist turn communicated by Brooker\u2019s illustrations for The Canadian Forum<\/em> and The Recluse<\/em>, the artist-advertiser\u2019s writings of the 1930s mount a Bergsonian critique of the spatial \u201cbias\u201d of science and technology similarly directed at modernity\u2019s ideology of progress. Bergson\u2019s most comprehensive statement of this argument is found in Creative Evolution<\/em>, in which he posits that Western philosophy and science alike substitute a \u201cspatialized time\u201d for the \u201cradical becoming\u201d of dur\u00e9e<\/em> (363, 273). However, a critique of scientific systems of measure and the \u201chomogeneous space\u201d imposed by the Western metaphysical tradition on the qualitative multiplicity of non-rational duration is already central to the thesis of Time and Free Will <\/em>(157, 335), Bergson\u2019s doctoral dissertation. For Bergson, clock time and the static \u201cforms\u201d of Platonism alike reduce the embodied experience of time as dur\u00e9e<\/em> to rigid schematizations.<\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s personal library\u2014preserved today with his papers at the University of Manitoba\u2014document his close reading of Bergson (see Luff). The philosopher\u2019s conceptualization of \u201cflux\u201d and creative evolution as counters to the rationalist tradition fuelled the Canadian artist\u2019s experimentation with synesthetic and time-based techniques in his advertising and visual art of the 1920s. \u201cAdvertising is alive!\u201d Brooker asserted in a 1926 Marketing <\/em>article, \u201cAnd being alive its development is in accord with those principles of\u00a0\u2018creative evolution\u2019 which Bergson has postulated of all living things. It is in flux, it is in a constant state of becoming\u201d (\u201cAre Statistics\u201d 115). Yet while Brooker\u2019s Bergsonian commitments prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 stemmed from a critique of the quantitative and \u201cvisual\u201d character of American advertising, the Depression years stimulated a more sweeping reassessment of the spatializing effects of communications media and scientific method that cleared a path for the subsequent writings of his compatriot Harold Innis on the \u201cmonopolies of space\u201d generated by print media and the emergent \u201cinformation industries\u201d (The Bias <\/em>128, 83).[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Brooker first articulates these themes in the 1931 journal article, \u201cIdolaters of Brevity.\u201d That text attends, in proto-Innisian fashion, to the \u201cphysical urgency of space and time\u201d as forces shaping what it presciently describes as a media \u201cenvironment\u201d (264). Brooker argues that, \u201cwith the popularization of the daily press the idolatry of brevity began in earnest\u201d (265). Setting the stage for Innis\u2019s arguments in \u201cThe Strategy of Culture\u201d and other essays on newspapers of the 1940s (see Buxton), Brooker posits a direct relationship between the rise of modern journalism and a growing demand for cultural forms characterized by their compressed scale\u2014including short stories, articles, and one-act plays. He concludes that, \u201c[l]iterature in America, seems doomed to be brief\u201d (266). Brooker\u2019s thesis in this article echoes elements of Wyndham Lewis\u2019s critique of popular culture in Time and Western Man<\/em>. In an early chapter of that text, Lewis writes:<\/p>\n Advertisement also implies in a very definite sense a certain attitude to Time. And the attitude proper to it is closely related to the particular time-philosophy [\u2026] that is at once \u2018timeless\u2019 in theory, and very much concerned with Time in practice. Both that conscious philosophy, and the instinctive attitude of the advertising mind towards Time, could be described as a Time-for-Time\u2019s-sake<\/em> belief. For both, Time is the permanent fact. Time for the bergsonian or relativist is fundamentally sensation; that is what Bergson\u2019s dur\u00e9e <\/em>always conceals beneath its pretentions to metaphysic. It is the glorification of the life-of-the-moment. (11)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The impact of Lewis\u2019s arguments on the pre-McLuhan body of Canadian media theory (see Paul Tiessen) is legible in Innis\u2019s paraphrasing in The Bias of Communication <\/em>of the British artist-author\u2019s assertion later in this same section of Time and Western Man<\/em>: \u201cThe world in which Advertisement dwells is a one-day world\u201d (Lewis 12; see also Innis, The Bias<\/em> 79). Brooker makes a similar formulation in \u201cIdolators of Brevity\u201d: \u201cWe, concerned more with the moment <\/em>than any past people, deliberately ignore the past and pride ourselves on our \u2018pure reactions\u2019 to the immediate present. And since we live so fast, our reactions and their recording must be brief\u201d (268, emphasis original). Lewis\u2019s speculations on the effects of media on perceptions of space and time were clearly influential on the Canadian artist-advertiser\u2019s space-time discourse. Yet Brooker was quick to dismiss Lewis\u2019s rejection of the organic philosophy of Bergson and Whitehead, characterizing Lewis as \u201ccloistered and unadventurous\u201d in an essay published in the British journal The Adelphi<\/em>, edited by former Bergsonist and Rhythmist John Middleton Murry (\u201cProphets Wanted\u201d 193; see also Antliff).<\/p>\n Given his prominence within the advertising profession, it is somewhat surprising to hear Brooker echoing the former Vorticist\u2019s critique of publicity in \u201cProphets Wanted.\u201d Sounding very much like the Lewis of Time and Western Man<\/em>, Brooker bemoans the \u201cbehavioristic rationalization of experience\u201d in \u201can age accustomed to advertising\u201d (184, 185). Despite these affinities, Brooker ultimately rejects Lewis\u2019s stance for its opposition to \u201cthe \u2018organic\u2019 philosophy of creative newness,\u201d which he associates with the writings of Murry and Whitehead (192).<\/p>\n Brooker\u2019s thesis in this text anticipates Innis\u2019s subsequent argument in \u201cThe Strategy of Culture\u201d\u2014his harried response to the 1951 Massey Report on Canadian cultural policy\u2014that, \u201c[o]ur poets and painters are reduced to the status of sandwich men\u201d by the influence of American advertising (Changing Concepts <\/em>11). Like Brooker, Lewis directly influenced Innis\u2019s discourse on the space-time effects of media. Yet as Andrew Wernick has noted, Innis\u2019s formulation actually reversed the terms of the Vorticist\u2019s argument (see Wernick 275). While this transformation may have been a consequence of Innis\u2019s notorious habit of composing his later texts through a juxtaposition of loosely re-written quotations (see Marchand 114-15; Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan<\/em>, 95; Watson 352\u201353), it is more likely evidence of a deliberate practice of reading Lewis against the grain that hearkens to Brooker\u2019s earlier non-conforming dialogue with the former Vorticist. Though echoing aspects of Lewis\u2019s critique of advertising and mass media, Brooker does so in support of a Bergsonian cosmology of flux, whereas Lewis repudiates the anti-rationalist valence of the French philosopher. Innis\u2019s later writings on media embody an allied strategy of appropriating the British artist-author\u2019s observations on the formative impact of advertising on perceptions of space and time to advance a program for reviving \u201coral\u201d and temporal forms to resist\u00a0the spatial bias that he attributed to the specter of American cultural imperialism.<\/p>\n In retrospect, we can see Brooker\u2019s writings and visual interventions of the 1930s\u2014particularly those published in The Canadian Forum<\/em>, which vied for space with articles on political economy by Innis and works of short fiction by his wife, Mary Quayle Innis\u2014as anticipating, and possibly acting as an indirect influence on, the Toronto School theorist\u2019s subsequent studies of newspapers and the sensory effects of media in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1920s, Brooker had acted as a member of The Canadian Forum<\/em>\u2019s editorial committee, which also included University of Toronto professor Barker Fairley\u2014an acquaintance of Wyndham Lewis\u2014as well as two of Innis\u2019s colleagues in the Department of Political Economy (see Canadian Forum; Mastin 28). During the subsequent period when both Brooker and Innis were active contributors to the magazine, CBC radio pioneer Graham Spry served as editor; Irene Biss, a colleague and confidant of Innis\u2019s at this time and another Forum <\/em>contributor, would later marry Spry (see Watson 191-98).[2]<\/a> Yet the arguments of Brooker\u2019s unpublished manuscript The Brave Voices <\/em>(ca. 1953-1955) attest to his status as a true contemporary of both later Innis and his self-proclaimed heir, McLuhan. Brooker\u2019s sprawling notes for this unfinished text explore sound- and time-based alternatives to the dominant techno-scientific paradigm of Cold War society in a fashion consistent with the \u201csound-based paradigm\u201d that Judith Stamps observes in the work of the Toronto School theorists (Unthinking Modernity<\/em> 11).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Brave Voices<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Conceived as a history of \u201cnine words that shaped the world\u201d (its original working title), The Brave Voices <\/em>renewed and intensified the Bergsonian themes that had fuelled Brooker\u2019s advertising writings of the 1920s. However, this engagement with the continental thinker\u2019s philosophy of flux was tempered in the later text by a critical awareness of the limitations of progress forged by the bitter lessons of the Depression and World War II. Brooker\u2019s Bergson-inspired critique of measure as a determinant of knowledge in a military-industrial complex resonates strongly with Innis and McLuhan\u2019s contemporaneous riposte to what Stamps terms the \u201cidentity-thinking\u201d of Western metaphysics and commodity capitalism (Unthinking Modernity<\/em> 13): the convention of treating objects in the world as one-to-one representations of abstract categories. A passage from a lengthy draft section of The Brave Voices <\/em>titled \u201cBergson\u201d gives Brooker\u2019s perhaps most explicit formulation of this thematic:<\/p>\n If our race discovered and embraced the belief that while we have sought Truth elsewhere, the pursuit of Truth\u2014scientific knowledge\u2014has led us astray from the reality of energy and spirit, which we cannot measure\u2014if we forsook the mistaken search for some sort of \u2018stuff\u2019 of which the world might be made, realizing that there is no \u2018stuff,\u2019 no solidity, no atoms or quanta\u2014these being only measurements, not anything that is<\/em>, but of something that passed\u2014if we could discard all these measurements and limits and gaps and deficiencies and embrace the amazing fact that life is actually LOVE\u2014we should take a new step in evolution. (n. pag.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Brooker\u2019s argument in this and similar passages from The Brave Voices <\/em>echoes Bergson\u2019s critique of scientific systems of measure as inadequate for describing the \u201cqualitative multiplicity\u201d of subjective experience in Time and Free Will <\/em>(Brooker\u2019s annotations to his personal copy of this text\u2014a 1950s reprint preserved at the University of Manitoba\u2014attest to his careful re-reading of Bergson during the composition of The Brave Voices<\/em>). Like Bergson, Brooker avoids the trap of outright anti-positivism, seeing science instead as embodying a fundamentally practical <\/em>view of matter, one powerless to grasp the essential flux of reality. \u201c[K]knowledge of reality cannot be arrived at through science,\u201d writes Brooker in a section of The Brave Voices <\/em>titled \u201cCourage\u201d: \u201cThe scientific view of the world is not merely a wrong view, it is properly not a view <\/em>at all\u2014it is simply an elaborate collection of diagrams\u201d (n. pag.). Employing a Bergsonian vocabulary of \u201ccuts,\u201d \u201cdiagrams,\u201d and \u201cmoulds\u201d to describe the rigidities of quantitative frameworks, The Brave Voices <\/em>proposes a musical <\/em>alternative to empirical knowledge that recalls the durational metaphor of \u201cmelody\u201d in Time and Free Will <\/em>(125). In contrast to the quantitative multiplicity furnished by the diagrams of geometry, Bergson opposes \u201cthe continuous or qualitative multiplicity\u201d of music (105). Brooker deploys a similar alternative in his resurrection of the classical Greek conception of nature as Phusis<\/em>, which he describes as \u201cthe ever-striving upward ascent of everything in nature\u201d (n. pag.). Brooker ascribes specifically musical qualities to Phusis <\/em>in a section of The Brave Voices <\/em>entitled \u201cA Short Section from Chapter on LOVE\u201d:<\/p>\n Music is man\u2019s closest approach to creating something that moves and exalts our feelings as do the creations of Nature. Words cannot express our feelings when we listen to music. The best we can do is to say that it is sad or gay, frivolous or profound. The untranslatable flow of music, the reasons for its charm and its capacity to haunt our minds with melodies, these are as mysterious as the flow and beauty of life itself. [\u2026] The Greeks, as we have seen, gave the name Phusis to the deep spring of action which rises continually throughout Nature and works from within upward in an \u2018ever-striving ascent.\u2019 (n. pag.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Phusis <\/em>serves as a material support for the critique of language that Gregory Betts has recently observed in Brooker\u2019s writings (although Betts downplays the Bergsonian foundations of the artist-advertiser\u2019s speculations in favour of a \u201cmystical\u201d exegesis that The Brave Voices <\/em>explicitly disavows).[3]<\/a> Much as Bergson critiques language in Creative Evolution <\/em>for substituting \u201can external thing\u201d for the living reality of duration (159), Brooker outlines his \u201cphilosophy of the verb\u201d in a section of The Brave Voices <\/em>titled \u201cCourage,\u201d as promoting a rejuvenation of language: \u201cThe verb \u2018doing\u2019 is the very essence of our theme. The worn old nouns have deluded us too long. To regenerate mankind, to re-vitalize morals, to set a mark for conduct, we must think in verbs, in terms of action, of day to day doing\u201d (n. pag.). The \u201coral\u201d qualities of the reconstructed language envisioned by Brooker in this section are embodied in the structural logic of The Brave Voices <\/em>as a whole, which the artist-advertiser explicitly conceived\u2014as he stated in a \u201cPostscript\u201d\u2014as a patchwork of quotations interacting dialogically:<\/p>\n When I was writing fiction I could never create a sense of reality in the characters if I tried to invent dialogue for them, I had to be in a mood of suspension\u2014switching my own voice off, as it were, and simply listening to what the characters would say. With this book the process is the same. As I write I am listening to a thousand voices, ancient and modern, whose words have come to me from distant ages and lands through fifty years of reading. [\u2026] In rewriting for the last time I have done my best to ignore heaps of notes\u2014filed away, to keep my desk clear\u2014and I sit in a sort of suspended state, making myself a receptacle, breathing in what comes uppermost in my ear from the voices of the past. (n. pag.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The self-conscious dialogism of The Brave Voices <\/em>parallels the \u201coral\u201d turn of Innis\u2019s later writings, which were penned almost simultaneously. The Toronto School theorist not only explored the non-linear properties of sound as a conceptual counter to the identity-thinking encouraged by conventional print media, but, through his method of composing his texts as a pastiche of quotations, Stamps claims that he \u201cinvent[ed] a quasi-oral mode of writing\u201d (Unthinking Modernity<\/em> 90). McLuhan would later observe that the compressed style of later Innis \u201csaves time\u201d (\u201cIntroduction\u201d ix). As with Booker\u2019s critical riposte to the utopian claims of \u201ctime-saving\u201d technologies in his illustrations for The Canadian Forum<\/em>, the quasi-theological resonance of McLuhan\u2019s rhetoric of redemption should not be overlooked (see Sterne). While rejecting the ideology of progress typically associated with \u201cservice products,\u201d late-Brooker and late-Innis alike seized on the interactive potential of the labour-saving device as a basis for exploring dialogical alternatives to the dominant (quantitative and \u201cspatial\u201d) media paradigm.<\/p>\n The sonic themes Brooker explores in The Brave Voices <\/em>are given visual expression in the contemporaneous canvas Double Bass <\/em>(ca. 1953-54) (Fig. 7), in which volutes of string instruments set in motion a genetic spiral of surrounding abstract elements. The painting\u2019s repeating scroll motif brings into representation Brooker\u2019s Bergsonian description of Phusis <\/em>as the \u201cever-striving ascent\u201d of melody.<\/p>\n\n
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