Wim T. Schippers

Wim T. Schippers
Wim T. Schippers in 2009
Born	Willem Theodoor Schippers (1942-07-01) 1 July 1942 (age 74) Groningen, Netherlands
Occupation	Artist, comedian, television director, and voice actor

Willem Theodoor "Wim T." Schippers (Dutch: [ʋɪm teː ˈsxɪpərs]; born 1 July 1942) is a Dutch artist, comedian, television director, and voice actor. During the 1960s, he worked mostly as a visual artist, associated with the international Fluxus-movement. As a television writer, director, and actor he is responsible for some of the most notable and controversial shows on Dutch televisions from the 1960s to the 1990s, creating a number of lasting characters and enriching the language with terms and expressions first coined in his shows. In addition, he voiced the characters of Ernie and Kermit the Frog on the Dutch version of Sesame Street. For his shows, he 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.

Schippers, born in Groningen, grew up in Bussum and studied at the Kunstnijverheidsschool (later the Gerrit Rietveld Academie) in Amsterdam but did not graduate. He began a career as a visual artist in the early 1960s, influenced by dada and artists as Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, participating in a number of Fluxus events, such as a section for the television program Signalement in 1963, in which he poured a bottle of lemonade in the North Sea.Willem Sandberg invited him and Ger van Elk to exhibit in Museum Fodor; among other things, they covered one floor with broken glass and one with kitchen salt. With Willem de Ridder and others he manufactured paper installations on the VARA television show Signalement that was ridiculed in the press in December 1963, and published a full-page enumeration of types of meat balls in 1965 in Vrij Nederland, already displaying his love for absurdist humor and language games that marked his later career. His first stint in television gained him notoriety along with the rest of the crew of the VPRO television show Hoepla (1967) when actress Phil Bloom became the first woman to appear nude on television. That show was quickly canceled, and Schippers returned to visual arts.