While a student at the School of Visual Arts in 1978, Keith Haring happened upon the Nova Convention, a gathering of Beat poets and downtown artists, including William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, and Patti Smith.  Soon after this introduction, Haring read and followed the exact methods laid out in Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s 1977 book  The Third Mind, which describes ways of breaking down language.  Theirs was the text-based foundation upon which Haring broke forward with his visual style in 1980, introducing his inimitable line to their “cut-up” method, and creating a form of pictorial communication that expanded beyond what ideas in traditional language could accomplish.
Though the two did not meet until 1983, Haring later said that Burroughs was “very into a lot of the world I’ve depicted, especially in the recent things – sex, mutations, weird science fiction situations.” Erotic grotesquerie mixed with Christian symbolism characterized the works of both men.
Timothy Leary, self-proclaimed guru of the acid age, remarked that Apocalypse, the first Haring-Burroughs collaboration, was “like Dante and Titian getting together.”1