The Anatomy Of Chaos: Montage, Collage, And Eroticism In the Work of Steven Stapleton

Creative Process

Steven Stapleton's body of work, consolidated over decades through his participation as a constant member of the experimental and avant-garde band Nurse With Wound for the last 30 years, and through his graphic output under the pseudonym Babs Santini, has led the artist to distinguish himself in both the music and visual arts scenes. His visual output points to a "dark and irreverent vision" and can be situated within a lineage that includes the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Situationists. This affiliation is not merely stylistic, as it allows us to understand his creative process. His artistic practice, both visual and sonic, can thus be analyzed as a continuous and systematic exercise in the deconstruction and reconfiguration of pre-existing cultural material. Through the application of collage and montage techniques, Stapleton not only questions aesthetic conventions but also explores a deviant eroticism, rooted in fragmentation and the grotesque.

Fig.1  Fellini

Fig.2

Fig.3

Fig.4

Fig.5

Dismemberment And Collage

The foundation of Stapleton's visual output, under the name Babs Santini, is collage. His work can be associated with artists like Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and Raoul Hausmann, pioneers who used collage not just as a technique, but as a statement. For the Dadaists, collage was a tool of cultural sabotage, a way of taking the detritus of consumer society and mass communication, newspapers, advertisements, technical manuals, and reorganizing them to expose their underlying arbitrariness and absurdity. Stapleton inherits and deepens this practice, as we can see in his album covers where disparate elements are forced into a conflicting coexistence.

Fig.6

His choice of material is almost always drawn from anachronistic and decontextualized sources, such as Victorian and Edwardian engravings, illustrations from old encyclopedias, medical diagrams, and photographs of animals and obsolete machinery. Stapleton's process can be described as an act of "using, abusing, and beating" the materials until they take on "unconventional shapes." The creative act thus incorporates violence, as the artist not only juxtaposes images but dissects, amputates, and fuses them into hybrid forms. In this sense, a human figure might have its head replaced by an inanimate object, an animal might be integrated into an industrial landscape, or an anatomical chart might be adorned with decorative elements.

Fig.7

The result does not seek a new surrealist harmony but rather a calculated dissonance, which ultimately generates a strong charge of dark humor. By stripping images of their original context, Stapleton nullifies their primary meaning and forces the viewer to confront the fragility of visual codes. An illustration that initially served to instruct or decorate becomes part of a new, illogical, and disturbing syntax. What makes this creative process possible is the way the artist decontextualizes cultural elements in order to construct new critical propositions. In this sense, Babs Santini’s collages function as appropriations, as they hijack the iconography of the past and of everyday life to articulate a critique of the present, exposing the strangeness that resides within the familiar. His visual work is not, therefore, a representation of chaos, but a methodological demonstration of how chaos can be constructed from apparent order.

Fig.8

You can check out the extended version of the article in Premium and discover more about his recurring themes, many additional visual examples of his extraordinary collages, and much MORE..!!

Click HERE for the obscene and provocative collage art of Ffo Art

What do you tink about Stapleton's erotic collage art? Leave your reaction in the comment box below...!!