Marcus McShane is the creator of NAG, a live action eco-theatre that is part of mini festival The Performance Arcade, a mini-festival running at Aotea Square from 14-23 October. When did you first come up with the idea for NAG; I understand your first presentation had a collection of 'to do' lists, whats the idea behind the work?
I write a lot of lists. About six years ago a girlfriend kept finding old lists under the bed, the fridge, in drifts behind the curtains etc, and found them fascinating, mainly for the way I talk to myself in them. She encouraged me to start saving them, and now I have thousands and thousands of the damn things.
I use my lists both to nag and to reward myself. To push myself to do and do and do. To make myself produce and produce and produce. They’re a kind of daily self-propulsion. I berate myself, I’m rude to myself and I’m silly with myself also. Writing a list has become a daily ritual. Every list I write is entitled “today”, even if I produce more than one list a day. After fifteen years of lists, if I go through a day without a list I feel naked. Lost, adrift, and crippled.
The Nag machine was originally conceived as a sort of metaphor for the way that I use lists to self-propel. It’s a wonderfully efficient machine for driving yourself to produce and produce and produce. It reflects my other obsessions with efficiency, bicycles, sustainability, and my sort of general delight in old things that are made well. The bicycle frames are a vintage Colnago Master and a even more vintage Freddy Grubb Comet, the wood is ancient pit-sawn rimu recycled from the old Sunnyside Psychiatric institution, and the switches and instrumentation range in era from 1903 to 1970.
So despite being in function a self-powered design studio this is, at heart, a machine that reflects the nagging techniques and means of self-propulsion that many artists find themselves going through in order to produce. It’s a device to take two artists and subject them to often hideous pressure, and then to see if any diamonds fall out.
Because we don’t know what we’re going to produce.
Maybe diamonds. Maybe poop.
What are some of the most interesting interactions you have had with the passing public while performing NAG?
Making and printing business cards, oddly. Weird hobolike selfpower geeks of the type who smell like old wine and go around muttering about peak oil being drawn to us like moths to a flame. Lots of people deciding we must be starving, and a frequent response to the work being to feed us. So often swapping sketching and writing for food. One day I ate four ice-creams in an hour. It's hard to politely refuse food sometimes. Running a chandelier at night and spinning old 40's swing jazz on the grammophone, which led to a swingdancing club coming down and dancing around us one night, which led to us powering a sort of undergound speakeasy-style swingdance club where if we stopped pedalling the whole place blacked out as well as the music stopping, which led to not a lot of writing getting done. Lots and lots of interaction. The public are proving to be an interesting and unpredictable beast.How did you construct the bike and the self-powered studio, how does it work?
Everything is recycled. But recycled stuff doesn't have to be junk. There's beauty in old things well made, and well made things last a long time. Two vintage bicycles are built into rimu frames and set to spin a pair or rewired old smartdrive washing machine motors, that then function as very efficient generators. They output 12v dc, which drives the grammophone, the lighting, and through a converter, the laptops. Additionally things like the printer, chandelier, scanner, and sound system are run through an inverter that transforms the 12dc to 230v ac. Simply put, the more things we turn on, the harder it gets to pedal. If one person stops, the other has to take up their load. If you can't keep pedalling, the system crashes, the music stops, everything goes black, and the laptops switch over to battery, if you've got an left by that stage. This starts to happen a lot by the end of the day. We're getting very fond of typewriters and pencils, because they don't use any power at all.You have often been described as a 'vintage bike enthusiast, lighting designer and Wellington icon', what do you think of that?
I'm certainly a bike enthusiast, but not necessarily vintage. Maybe enthusiast isn't strong enough sometimes. Maybe bicycle preacher would be more accurate. I just have a long-standing delight in and obsession with efficiency and reuse that goes back about as far as I can remember, and as well as being inherently elegant and beautiful things like bicycles and yachts are tremendously efficient. That efficiency is where a lot of their beauty and the joy in using them lies.
And yup, I'm certainly a lighting designer. Because playing with words and tinkering with bicycles usually doesn't earn a man enough money to buy good cheese. There's massive efficiency issues in lighting also. We waste a lot of power through poor lighting and poor design, and it's really satisfying to sometimes design and build something that's simple and beautiful and makes the best use of its environment. Lighting design is a simple expressive way to do this.
And Wellington icon? Hmm. Well, if that's true, when I die, I want a park bench with my name on it.
Can you describe to us a 'day in the life of Marcus McShane'
I'm not much of a “dear diary” style writer. The lists are a compressed little day-in-the-life really. Here's the one in my pocket today:
1) rise rehearsal at 1pm.
2) Pack bike for hastings
3) shave
4) tidy the place before olivia gets home
5) call debs/rise
6) call graeme/explosives for peter?
7) Write! Write you lazy beast
8) 5.15 train, then ride
9) flowers for c.
10) wash yr pants before you leave
11) invoicing. Do your invoices on the train.
12) Dance monkeyboy, dance
13) Call sony about old laptop and growl at them
14) catch up with mark/RWC project. Bills?
But the Beatles do a way better Day in the Life than I ever could.
This is an arts and entertainment blog facilitated by THE EDGE, the home of the Aotea Centre, The Civic, Auckland Town Hall and Aotea Square in Auckland, New Zealand.