Bertram Brooker: A Beautiful Hypothesis

Faced with uneasy times when the status quo suddenly seems to be fundamentally flawed, it’s often been a natural human inclination to seek out alternate models of belief. The exhibition “It’s Alive: Bertram Brooker and Vitalism,” currently on view at the Art Gallery of Windsor, makes a perfect case in point. In a selection of more than 50 paintings and works on paper, the exhibition tracks Brooker’s abiding interest in the real-life implications of vitalism, a pseudo-scientific belief system based on the essential understanding that a higher level of consciousness was dictated by an all-encompassing life force or “vital spark.” Proponents of the theory rightly called it “a beautiful hypothesis.”

Works in the exhibition range from pure abstractions where unfolding layers of shape and colour take on a near-Cubist synergy to figurative and graphic works that capture a fantastic merging of organic and abstract forms. Brooker was also fascinated by the dynamic potential of moving images as seen in the exhibition’s rare screening of his 1912 film scenario for The Adventure of the Thumb Print.

There is, however, another angle to this survey exhibition. Despite his mystical leanings, Brooker was a grounded pragmatist. As a marketing executive with deeply philosophical concerns about how mass communications (i.e. advertisements) “must arouse and produce action,” Brooker’s mystical instincts were as much professional as they were artistic. In fact, in the 1930s Brooker authored a series of influential advertising stratagems informed by vitalist principles of “direct communication” that might otherwise be considered divergent or fantastical. It’s an interesting spin by curator Adam Lauder that, considering the mass media theories of another influential Canadian thinker, Marshall McLuhan, more than three decades later, puts Brooker’s visionary art and ideas into an entirely new dimension. (401 Riverside Dr W, Windsor ON)