Santa Monica

Keith Haring and William Burroughs? A partnership that sounds like Spy magazine shenanigans actually makes a lot of sense. The 31-year-old artist’s street smart art turns out to be just the ticket to accompany brief works by the 75-year-old author known for his nightmarish visions of the drug underworld and experimental prose style. The works in question are “Apocalypse,” a breathless prose poem studded with quotes from T. S. Eliot, and “The Valley,” a chapter from “The Western Lands.”

Haring’s 10 silk screens for “Apocalypse” achieve a blend of jejune fancifulness, wild posturing and impudent borrowings from high culture--much in the same vein as Burroughs’ contribution. On a sheet illustrating a passage with the phrase “the Piper pulled down the sky,” a figure whose head is the “Mona Lisa” reworked into a staring, zonked-out face reaches up to pluck a black net of scribbles from overhead.

“The Valley” is about a colony of people with great musical talent who are trapped in a valley. They live largely on radioactive corn, which makes them die horrible deaths--a tacit invocation of the specter of AIDS. In his suite of etchings, Haring’s “graffiti” style gives the figures a rude, comic book-mythic quality that is as transparently effective as Burroughs’ fable. (B-1 Gallery, 2730 Main St., to Nov. 15.)