Wim T Schippers

Vocation

Dutch visual artist, writer, comedian, television director and voice actor. He started as an enfant terrible in the art world, but is now seen as one of the most inventive Dutch television and theatre makers. He was born in Groningen, moved as a toddler to Amsterdam and followed the HBS in Bussum. In 1959 he went to now Rietveld academy for visual arts in Amsterdam. In the early sixties, he sold his provocative art to Willem Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The art consisted as rather absurd performances like "Aan het strand te Petten", where he poured a bottle of Green Spot lemonade into the sea (1961). In Museum Fodor he arranged a room with broken glass and one room full of salt (1962). In the sixties he was a member of the international Fluxus movement, that was inspired by Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp. He called his art "a-dynamic" and it was more like displaying the innocence of children's play, than bringing the great and pretentious messages. It was not "art for art", but more like an homo ludens. He wrote: "Alle kunst is een afleidingsmanoeuvre, en je kunt het net zo goed laten". But the revolutionary sixties and seventies in Amsterdam were also the years that his generation broke with the law and order morale of the fifties. The child like attitude of pot smoking "Kabouters" and "all we need is love" hippies, were just as undermining the repressive structure of society as the child in The Emperor's New Clothes. As a television writer, director and actor he is responsible for some of the most notable and controversial shows on Dutch televisions from the late 1960s to the 1990s, creating a number of lasting characters and enriching the language with terms and expressions first coined in his shows. On 28 July 1967, he presented in the Dutch youth program the Fluxus performance artist Phill Blooom on Dutch television. During the performance of Teddy Lee J., singing "I'm a sexman", she walked around almost nude, only being dressed by a garland. On 9 October 1967, Phill Bloom became "TV's first nude" and was interviewed by Playboy. Of course, the mythic nudes being painted in art museums were tolerated for centuries, but a real nude walking around on television, caused a scandal. In addition, he voiced the characters of Ernie and Kermit the Frog on the Dutch version of Sesame Street. His brilliant, often absurd dadaistic, Dutch versions of the Bert and Ernie dialogues were as fascinating for the children, as their parents. Schippers (meaning shipper's son) has written over three hundred songs, and his reputation has changed from being Dutch television's "enfant terrible" to an acknowledged master in a variety of genres. Link to Wikipedia