"Every dedicated artist attempts the impossible. Success will write APOCALYPSE across the sky. The artist aims for a miracle. The painter wills his picture to move off the canvas with a separate life, movements outside of the picture, and one rent in the fabrics is all it takes for pandemonium to sluice through.”

—William S. Burroughs, in the Introduction to Apocalypse

In 1978 while a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Keith Haring discovered the Beat poets and soon launched into reading William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s 1977 book The Third Mind, which describes various ways of breaking down language. This text deeply inspired Haring’s visual style, creating his visual lexicon that expanded beyond what traditional language could accomplish. In return, Burroughs became a reciprocal fan of Haring’s and the two met in 1983, with the artist commenting that the writer was “very into a lot of the world I’ve depicted, especially in the recent things – sex, mutations, weird science fiction situations.” The two men additionally shared a fondness for mixing the erotic grotesque with Christian symbolism.  

For their 1988 collaboration of Apocalypse, Haring appropriated and collaged symbols of mass consumerism, religion, art and advertisements in response to Burrough’s free-form text. 1988 was also the year that Haring was diagnosed with AIDS, which had already begun to ravage New York’s downtown community. The imagery of Apocalypse, teeming with imagery of devil-horned sperm, radiant light, pieces of technology, halos, phallic forms, and halos, references the complexity of life at this time, with all its struggles, torment, and brief moments of bliss. Meanwhile, Burroughs’ accompanying text highlights the moment’s rhetoric of euphoria and fear, filtered through the “cut-up technique” that The Third Mind showcased to Haring. The present print, which was used as the ninth image of ten in the portfolio, was presented alongside a verse by Burroughs that presents a city in its final moments of apocalyptic chaos:

Force let it come, skyscrapers scrape rents of the final Apocalypse in the sky, dream rivers splashing color across solid roads and buildings, AMOK art vitality stirring passions of metal blur by writhing in mineral lusts, walls of glass melt OFF THE TRACK OFF a billion crazed eyes, the sidewalks run feet and tires, chimneys ejaculate blue tunnels break out graffiti village pulled across the sky in flaming colors. 

 William S. Burroughs reads the entirety of Apocalypse, with music by Bill Giant, Eugene Cines, Frank Denning, Ray Ellis for his 1990 spoken word album Dead City Radio.