Gary Panter blog

BOO PALACE

At the end of the 1990s I was working for FUNNY GARBAGE, a New York media company started by three of my friends; John Carlin, Peter Girardi and Chris Capuozzo.
Luckily for me, these three were guys who liked my work and they had me writing and designing an animated series called THE PINK DONKEY AND THE FLY for Sam and Paola at the CARTOON NETWORK for the CARTOON NETWORK WEBSITE. They hired my friend RIC HEITZMAN to direct the PINK DONKEY cartoons and also JAY COTTON to do the music. So after many years the APEWEEKERS were working on a project together and the guys at FUNNY GARBAGE were interested in puppets and stuff, too and our stories of APEWEEK.
To make a long story short, FUNNY GARBAGE rented the room next to my studio in Brooklyn and for a year Chris and Peter and Ric and I gathered every Thursday evening to work on experimental puppets to see what we might come up with. We had a lot of fun and the whole thing was a bit reminiscent of APEWEEK and it was meant to be. We taped a lot of silly improvised puppets and the little light show that I had been working on in my studio was made bigger and I really began to delve into light abstraction.
Chris wrote a script and we did a backlit stop-motion version of it that turned out really neat. We built some latex rubber and cloth puppets and did video tests with them using the light show abstraction as background texture. It looked really neat.
Eventually, we stopped doing puppet night, having learned a few things and having accomplished some tests and experiments and had a little cult for a year.

Peter is in L.A. designing the CRANKYANKERS show.
Ric is in L.A. making paintings and commercials.
Chris is having a painting show at Sandra Gering gallery in the Spring.
John is doing a TV series on painting for WNET.
I'm writing a blog.

APEWEEK

I graduated from art school in 1974. My senior painting show had been a puppet show called GODZILLA GETS A HOT TV and I had some INCREDIBLE STRING BAND and BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER fantasy of getting trucks or wagons and forming a gypsy caravan to tour across the country with some kind of Indonesian/Japanese derived puppet show. I never did that, but my friends JAY COTTON and RIC HEITZMAN and I formed a performance art group in Dallas in 1975.

Named for the week of giant ape movies occasionally featured on local TV in Dallas, APEWEEK featured shadow puppets, Americanized BUNRAKU style puppets and stand up COMEDY. With STANDUP COMEDY and prerecorded SOUNDTRACKS composed and provided by Jay Cotton. Ric Heitzman headed up the SHADOW PUPPET section. I was building the BUNRAKU style puppets. Having a leader in each area seemed to help the collaboration.

APEWEEK promoted MONKEY CONSCIOUSNESS on our weekly radio show on KPFK the local Dallas public access listener-supported radio station, but were kicked off the air after a couple of months for generally chaotic sounding broadcasts, although we wrote scripts and prerecorded the shows.

APEWEEK performed at various galleries and art spaces in Dallas and at the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in the summer of 1976

APEWEEK had a show at the CAM in Houston, but our cargo cult performance art did not find favor in Houston, in fact, I'm afraid we offended some folks. The exhibition of our flat art and paintings was beautifully hung.

We broke up the act in 1976. Ric went to graduate school in Chicago. Jay and I moved to LA.

The puppets slowly turned to jelly.