Multitalented KC artist Stephen Proski points the way.
“Punk is dead. Get over it,” writes Stephen Proski in FVTVRE PVNK, a manifesto that marked his break with the Kansas City punk rock scene.
But Proski never let his association with the punk scene define him. Over the last decade Proski, a writer, painter, graphic designer, guitarist, singer and underground club owner, has had a diverse creative presence in Kansas City. So diverse you might call him a Renaissance man, if such a term didn’t seem so inappropriately classical and tasteful for his rebellious, often shocking and counter-culture art practice.
Though Proski found local success with punk bands like Meat Mist, he became disillusioned with the local punk scene, in particular with what he calls “the same bands breaking up and reforming with new names” and an environment of unhealthy hostility and gender discrimination. Putting down his guitar in favor of a laptop, he has been branded a turncoat in the punk scene, accused of making dubstep, or in other words, selling out to pop music.
With the help of two collaborators, Proski created Human Traffic, a glitch music band in the vein of older industrial techno bands but with a 21st-century digital twist. The band members took new names: Stephen Proski became Re Hab (vocals and music), Anthony Vannicola became Zara Levina (music), and Lauren Chastain became Lola Rat (vocals).
Human Traffic’s music is loud, glitchy, harsh, but with a strong danceable beat. Aesthetically, it resembles what is often called industrial music, and Human Traffic has played shows with older, well-established industrial acts like Frontline Assembly. In FVTVRE PVNK, Proski writes “The body is a body. It should be used for pleasure. Express yourself without fear. Dress up your sex. Move where the music takes you.” While this might sound naively simple, this joyful bodily movement is set against darker lyrics concerning actual human trafficking. In this context, using your own body for pleasure is more than escapist hedonism, dancing becomes about human rights, the right to your own body and its freedom.
And so Proski and Vannicola created a place to “be a body” and to dance—they made Negative Space, an underground, off-the-books, nightclub and art gallery, located on the second floor of an old West Bottoms warehouse. Local legends say the building was a jazz club that featured people like Charlie Parker, and that later it became an illegal bestiality sex club. Along with Human Traffic, other dark, subversive bands like Plack Blague and Organized Crimes played at Negative Space during its roughly two-year existence from 2014 to 2015. Group art exhibitions featured local artists like Alex Savage and Carrie Riehl alongside artists from further afield like Hunter Jonakin.
Like any underground club, Negative Space attracted its fair share of underage drinking, drugs and partial nudity. It gained a reputation for over-the-top shows, a place where the audience could really let loose.
The scene that grew around Negative Space matched the visions of Proski’s FVTVRE PVNK manifesto. It was a place where you could “dress up your sex” or “get to know yourself without having to look in a mirror.” Negative Space was never the sausage fest of male bodies so common at punk and metal venues. The crowds were always filled with men, women, and people of genders you couldn’t label without an impolite interrogation. Interestingly, it wasn’t just the bands who took new names and wore strange outfits, it seemed every other person had an unusual, likely self-created, name.
At a series of events called DETOX, Negative Space was transformed with art installations and performance art to create what Proski calls a “medicinal experience.” At the first DETOX event, large metal barrels, reminiscent of toxic waste containers, were painted and arranged around the venue. Halfway through the night, people emerged wearing costumes and distributing a glowing sticky substance in prescription pill bottles. No one was informed what the substance was at the time, but as people drank the fluid, the atmosphere changed, people danced more intensely and really acted out.
In truth, the mystery drug was a fake—a sticky, sugary combination of snow-cone syrup and tonic water, which happens to glow under black light. It yielded all the ecstasy of a typical drug-induced rave or 1960s acid test, but was created with a placebo.
[block pos=”right”]“The body is a body. It should be used for pleasure. Express yourself without fear. Dress up your sex. Move where the music takes you.” —Stephen Proski, FVTVRE PVNK[/block]
Proski’s art practice isn’t all orgiastic costume parties though. In FVTVRE PVNK, Proski outlines another set of injunctions: “The internet exists. Learn something and get educated. You have infinite access to everything. There is no longer an excuse to be ignorant.” Proski’s digital design work and paintings reflect these commandments to internal, self-education, while maintaining his rough, subversive attitude.
Paintings like Stop the Fucking Car and Sundowning feel like pieces of modernist abstraction which have been ripped apart and rearranged. Rough and crisp edges clash against one another. Surprisingly, Proski’s abstract paintings have a real sense of attitude, like they’re telling the viewer to (back) off, an impressive accomplishment for a genre of painting that often comes off as coldly academic or ambiguously spiritual. His color choices are aesthetically jarring and impressive, perhaps due to his partial color blindness, which allows Proski a very punk indifference to the beauty and ugliness of color.
In FVTVRE PVNK he even compares art to trash. “Art is garbage. Our trash inhabits the earth and the ocean. We are creatures of waste. Embrace this and keep producing.”
No phrase sums up Stephen Proski better than rough edges, whether it’s the literal rough edges of his paintings, the glitchy noise of his music, or the abrasive attitude in his writings.
He is a Renaissance man only in the sense of devoting himself to multiple arts—his demeanor couldn’t be further from the humanistic positivity of the intellectuals of the Renaissance, those long-dead philosophers, artists and scientists, who discovered truth through scientific discovery, who dreamed of a beautiful future through invention and who believed in the inherent goodness of humanity.
Proski’s philosophy is much different, as he writes in FVTVRE PVNK. “The future is now over with. Look beyond the physical for enlightenment. There is no meaning or definition on this planet. The truth is what you make of it. Everything has already happened. Become a slave to repetition. The earth moves in circles for a reason. Put on another piece of wax and keep spinning.”
Perhaps this is how history will remember the intellectuals of the 21st century: Nihilistic creators, untroubled by a lack of meaning, in fact, freed by the lack of meaning or truth, with an incessant need to keep producing anyway.
