William S. Burroughs, Apocalypse

`Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-believe, illusion, dream…ART.’ (William S. Burroughs, Apocalypse)

Keith Haring met the Beat poet and novelist William S. Burroughs in 1978 while a student at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Burroughs's ‘Cut Up’ method of deconstructing language was an important influence on the young artist’s own ‘stream of consciousness’ style. Apocalypse, their first collaboration, created in 1988, consists of ten pages of Burroughs's free form text with ten screenprints by Haring. A contemporary reprise of the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, itself an inspiration for a long lineage of artists from Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymous Bosch to Salvador Dali, Haring riffs on Burroughs's text, appropriating imagery drawn from the street, and pop culture, and juxtaposing themes of religion and sex, life and death, adverts and activism, in his distinctive, high-energy linear style. Haring’s diagnosis with AIDS earlier in that year adds a poignant dimension to Apocalypse, and his iconography of ‘computers, spermatozoa, devils, halos, divine light and radiance shows the complexity, struggles, torment, and illusory bliss of life at that time’ (Pace Prints, Keith Haring: Collaborations with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, November 2018).