Keith Haring Apocalypse (Portfolio) (Littman p.98-109) For Sale

Apocalypse is a portfolio of ten silkscreen prints, a collaboration between Keith Haring and ‘Beat’ writer William Burroughs. The portfolio brings together two giants of the twentieth century - one in art and one in literature - who create a surreal, sinister and post-modern hellscape told through experimental text and ‘cut-up’ visual form.  

In 1978, when Haring was a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he came across the Nova Convention, a gathering of Beat poets which included William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Known for their unconventional, explicit writing (both Allen Ginberg’s poem ‘Howl’ and William Burrough’s novel Naked Lunch were both judged in obscenity trials), Haring was interested in the movement, but did not meet William Burroughs until 1983. 

Haring became familiar with a technique used by Burroughs, the ‘cut-up’ technique, whereby the artist treats language like a collage and reorders words at random, creating a spontaneous and often nonsensical work. Though used in literature, Haring was inspired by the idea in his visual art, in the sense that his pictorial elements are treated as a kind of syntax. He wrote in a diary entry: ‘Paintings can be poems if they are read as words instead of images. Images that represent words.’ In Apocalypse, the interplay between word and image reaches immense power. 

Burroughs invokes a setting in which the dark parts of the psyche are as tangible as the hustle and bustle of New York: ‘The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be, electric vitality of careening subways faster faster..’

Haring’s first plate defaces Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, an emblem of classical art. Devilled sperm, with horns, are on either side of the image. Both the sperm and the graffitied Mona Lisa are motifs seen throughout Apocalypse and have loaded meanings. At the time of Apocalypse's creation, Haring had been diagnosed with AIDs, and he had experienced the loss of many of his friends due to the illness. The devilish representation of sperm points to the transmission of the disease. The Mona Lisa, with Haring’s crosses obscuring her eyes, can be seen as a blasphemous overturning of tradition that the artist participates in: Burroughs directly references Haring’s Subway Drawings in the introduction: ‘But art is spilling out of its frames into subway graffiti. Will it stop there? Consider an apocalyptic statement: ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.’ In the second plate and text the graffiti ‘eats through glass and steel like acid’, visually represented by Haring’s horizon that features robotic figures, graffiti tags and spillages.  

In every plate of the suite, the world’s end is described with absurd visual imagery that combines art and technology, nature and the man-made world, myth and capitalism. In plate three we barely see any human forms except for the phallic: it is a scene populated by robotic parts and surveillance. In the text the ‘household appliances revolt, washing machines snatch clothes..electric toothbrushes leap into screaming mouths’. In this doomsday where electronics usurp humans, it is ‘survival artists, paint cans strapped to their backs’ who fight. 

What is exceptional about Haring’s Apocalypse is that the artist, known at this time and in the current day for an easily recognisable visual alphabet, has here turned to a far more delicate graphic line. A crucifixion, for instance, is drawn in plate nine, but it is a realistic one with visible ribs and hands, unlike Haring’s cartoonish portrayals of the scene from his Subway Drawings and in other prints. Further, many of his pictures are entirely new and undoubtedly influenced by Burroughs’ writing. Combining found imagery with drawing, monochrome and colour, Haring’s illustrations demonstrate his breaking out of his previously accustomed style, an appropriate measure for the otherworldly and provocative content of the portfolio.