Erik Kennedy
The Other Way by David Trubridge (David Trubridge Press, 2022), 317pp, 128 colour plates, $99
Renowned designer David Trubridge has always demonstrated a commitment to sustainability and the environment in his work, whether in furniture, lighting or other media. The Other Way, a book of travel essays and photographs, allows him to articulate his ideas on these subjects in new ways.
The ‘other way’ of the title refers to Trubridge’s favoured travel itinerary: if a place attracts ‘teeming crowds’, he will instinctively go the other way, to the land. ‘Humans once had a close and balanced relationship with all the natural world around them’, he writes. ‘This instinctive respect and empathy formed the basis of spirituality. I want to reclaim that spirituality and gently place it back where it belongs in the centre of our connection to the whole of “Life”.’ His desire to foreground nature—and his corresponding wariness of humanity, especially Westerners—characterises the book. It is deep ecology, a principled resistance to the instrumentalisation of the natural world.
With this in mind, Trubridge takes us through thirteen essays about different places around the world, on six continents (Africa is the odd man out), visited from the mid-2000s to 2021. He occasionally intersperses prosy poems, which effectively complement his often-poetical prose. The individual essays are engaging and transporting while one is reading them, but they don’t necessarily lodge in the mind. Reflection is a good thing in travel writing, but dramatic tension isn’t a bad thing, and without it sometimes the pieces dissolve into a sameness. The 128 colour photographs are gorgeous, stunning. For anyone wondering if the expensive coffee table book format still has a place in the modern market, or an attraction for the modern book-buyer, the answer is yes.
Trubridge has various reasons for visiting the places he does: an artist’s residency, a nearby trade show, an unquenchable personal longing. He feels guilty about flying; climate change is on his mind—and how could it not be when the places he goes to show signs of its impact? ‘Travel is, of course, a privilege and it matters enormously what we do with it’, he realises. ‘It is not something to be taken lightly, to engage with superficially’. Trubridge does not engage with anything superficially.
We begin in Antarctica in 2004, on Ross Island and the Koettlitz Glacier. The landscape and seascape bewitch Trubridge:
All sense of time and history drops away.
There is only the searing blue sky
and blinding whiteness.
This is my tabula rasa,
my empty beginning,
my clean slate on which
to write a new story.
‘I have never seen such stunning beauty ever in nature’, he says, summing the experience up. But his subsequent destinations offer up some rivals. He goes to Western Australia, Hawke’s Bay, Iceland, Hokkaido, Åland, the Grand Canyon, the Cilentan Coast, Rapa Nui, Valparaíso, Patagonia, the Altiplano, Alaska, and Tamatea / Dusky Sound. Nearly every colour, light-state, and variety of silence is represented in these places. He travels alone, walking non-stop in his preferred rhythm for hours, sometimes availing himself of the convenience of a stand-up paddleboard or a little ute. His occasional encounters with other people are a mixed blessing. He gets a valuable travel tip from a restaurant server in northeast Iceland and he admires Chileans who ‘have not lost their spirit’, but he is suspicious of overly ‘rational’ scientists and he consistently finds Americans loud and disruptive. (Maybe it’s true.)
Trubridge gives the impression of being not entirely at home in the human world. At one point he says he ‘feel[s] closer’ to two Fuegians in ethnographic photos from the 1920s than to a room full of his contemporaries. At another point he tells us that he once ‘took a tuktuk out into the country’ in Cambodia and ‘walked up to a small collection of carvings in the rock by an unknown hermit’. ‘Here I felt an affinity’, he says. For Trubridge, a corollary of his centring of nature is a lack of interest in humans. Well, some humans:
I feel adrift and rootless since I have forsaken the culture into which I was born. Everything about British statehood—imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy—has become anathema to me today. Humans lived sustainably all around the world until European culture expanded outwards and then arrived on distant shores—distant to them but already home to others. Imposition and competition drove it, along with the reductionism of science, the belief in ‘progress’ and the control of nature … I was born into pride and will die ashamed.
The English-born Trubridge correctly connects environmental degradation to the capitalist imperative for infinite growth on a finite planet. But he goes further than this—he sees deep spiritual rot, too. Trubridge doesn’t think there’s much worth salvaging from Western societies: ‘This Western culture has no inner resilience, only its faith in its own science and technology, plus an ideology of individualism. A complacent cynicism has killed off its myths and folklore.’ (He doesn’t say it in so many words, but he mostly acquits himself of these charges. It’s also worth pointing out that all the literary influences he cites in the acknowledgements are British, French or American, and white.) This is a little sad. Approaches to culture based primarily on rejection rather than synthesis risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He speaks eloquently of Indigenous land stewardship (kaitiakitanga in an Aotearoa context), and his critiques of settler colonialism and scientism are fair and necessary, but his tart cultural analysis won’t convince every reader.
Trubridge’s desire to transcend society leads him to some awkward positions. The most surprising of these to me was his take on art and politics: ‘I also find beauty in the arts’, he writes, ‘in the creations of humans when they are apolitical’. I really don’t expect, in the hellish year of 2022, to see ‘art should rise above politics’ advanced as a serious philosophy. This is a Rousseauian fantasy—that there can be such a thing as a pure, unspoiled, entirely aesthetic art. You know, the kind of art that existed before the world got complicated. This was never the case, and it’s wishful thinking on Trubridge’s part to imagine that it could be.
While I can’t agree with parts of Trubridge’s aesthetics, I do understand where he’s coming from, because he describes the source of his ideas. In the Grand Canyon chapter, he tells us that he was working on a series of lectures called Beauty Matters, to be delivered to other designers. The thrust of the series was that ‘the things we design need to do more than fulfil practical and sustainable requirements—they also need to nourish us spiritually. Because beauty matters’. This, I think, is uncontroversial. What is interesting, and maybe a little provocative, is his sketch of ancient art history:
In my ‘Beauty Matters’ lectures, I speculate that the concept of beauty was born in the Paleolithic era while humans were starting to make art on the walls of caves. All their early art featured animals … In their proto-art, the Paleolithic hunters were trying to come to terms with the thriving life they saw all around them, to express their relationship with it, to access its vitality. Maybe they also felt a lingering sense of nostalgia for the simple certainties which they had lost? As humans they could now reason and communicate, but with that apple of knowledge came the seeds of doubt.
Does nostalgia for simple certainties underpin cave painting? I don’t know. It’s a new reading to me. But it sounds a lot like Trubridge’s own theory of art projected backwards through time. This is not to say that he’s wrong, but it explains why he feels the way he does about modern art. If there is something eternal about the way we try to create beauty—if it is always an attempt to recover or reconnect with something we have lost—then of course he will be wary of the intrusion of messy ‘politics’ into art. The problem, of course, is that deep ecology is already a political position, and fighting for the preservation of the natural world can’t be done without resorting to political means. Art, too, has an important role to play in this process, including Trubridge’s.
The Other Way may be a little ahead of its time: it imagines a world in which far more people are in touch with the immediacy of nature and is frustrated with those who aren’t there yet. This is a frustration that most environmental activists understandably share (at least in my experience). As a work of artistic activism, this is a clear, and clear-eyed, book. Ultimately, Trubridge wants us to know, the important thing is to pay attention to the earth, notice things: ‘The closer you look, the more you discover smaller, more intricate patterns—you don’t need to go anywhere, just deeper.’ It’s as simple and as hard as that.
ERIK KENNEDY is the author of, most recently, Another Beautiful Day Indoors (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand (Auckland University Press, 2022), an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific. He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
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