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Sporting some nascent stubble, Chester McDaniels '11 walked into the Olney-Margolis Athletic Center for the first time in his Brown career. An artist who has performed many quasi-understandable pieces of music-based performance art on the Main Green, McDaniels was unveiling a new project at a press conference with greater-than-expected attendance.
"I appreciate the three of you gathering here today as I begin my examination of the conception of the male gender, which I'm calling Gander. In previous projects, I attempted to utterly destroy such a limiting societal construct through a variety of media, and now I'll begin to try to understand what it's like to be entirely masculine," McDaniels said.
"I'm a sensitive artist but I'm also an artist sensitive to the nuances and difficulties of a variety of experiences," McDaniels further explained, somewhat tiresomely. "I'm going to inhabit a role without feeling inhibited, experiment with experience," he alliterated.
A single in East Andrews has served as both studio and home for the artist during many of his creative projects. "Right now it's a great place to start writing some songs about the difficulties of manhood in modern times. The music room, which used to be the studio, has been renamed the Stud. It's all about the power of positive thinking, you know."
"The beard, which I consider to be an integral part of the project, has been coming along a little more slowly than I had thought," he said. "Right now, as you can see, it doesn't look like I'm a man's man so much as that someone snuck into my room and glued a bunch of hair from the shower drain onto my face. Add to this the fact that Rogaine, when applied to the chin, just gives you a nasty rash."
One of McDaniels' friends, Landon Ford '11, has been instrumental in aiding the artist. "At first he was torn between focusing on the beard or the balls. But it's not an either/or problem. You know those TruckNutz things? I've had him wearing a pair of those around to seem a little more manly. It's a subtle touch, and he liked that their weight was a kind of metaphor for some other kind of burden," he said.
McDaniels has not left his music untouched for this project. Ford began waking McDaniels up with a glass of warm scotch and a cigar to give his seraphic tenor a raspier edge. "We have also been using some vocal processing to make his voice deeper. We're still working out some glitches - right now he sounds like the offspring of Barry White and Cher. Way too deep," explained Ford.
Leah Symanski '12, another McDaniels associate, has seen an uptick in the artist's interactions with members of the opposite sex. "Before this project you wouldn't see Chester do much beyond talk to a few girls at a party without first having a glass or two of Franzia. But now he actually puts some moves on, beer in hand, and for some reason he loves to grind with those TruckNutz on."
McDaniels is still unsure what his next project will be. "People will kind of expect me to do the female experience now, but I just don't feel it. I was thinking about doing a piece on those ostriches that are forced to lay eggs on those farms. It's pretty much the natural follow-up to this project."
