I am curious generally about graffiti, you might know this already about me. It’s an expression, it’s a mischief. People get very exercised about it. It carries meaning beyond its meaning. You can learn huge amounts about the undercurrent of any city you’ve just arrived in by the nature of the tags.
Helch was another of the “anonymous” taggers, like Banksy despite the fact that a few people missed the point of that a few months ago. He wasn’t as acerbic or as clever as Banksy but that’s not what he was setting out to do. Nobody has been able to do commentary and mischief as effectively as Banksy through that medium, which is how he got to shred his own picture at Sotheby’s.
Helch was a different creature in the same world. London’s own, and he was big contentious and colourful. He pissed off loads of people by tagging over “Give Peas a Chance” on the way into London, making it “Give HELCH a Chance”. He apparently pissed off the queen when he tagged something she could see from her window. That’s reach for any artist. I’ve been following his stuff for years – I thought I’d written about it already but I can’t find the blog.
His tags were usually big bright noisy “me” tags. Just his H or his name, often very colourful. And he got them in really tricky places. It requires dedication, work and skill to get these things done, it’s against the law and you’ll piss off the small c conservatives no matter where you do it.
I like it for that reason. Some people got so pissed off about Banksy not chiming with their worldview that they decided to try and “unmask” him and then discovered that nobody really wanted to know. It isn’t a big “gotcha” to publish these people’s real names. Largely the people that think it is are the ones without an artistic bone in their body. We saw it again with Count Binface, and people thinking they had some big scoop when he was always open about it and that wasn’t the art. It doesn’t matter that it’s David Prowse and James Earl Jones, we are happy to say Darth Vader. Binface was performance art and found a perfect moment. He annoyed a lot of people too which is as it should be.
A great joy of art is that it’s subjective. One person might love it, ten others might hate it. That doesn’t make it any more or less art. The art world intersects with the mischief world even more completely than the acting world does now. It hasn’t been coopted by people trying to make everything safe and predictable.
To my sensibilities, HELCH belonged to the art world much more than anyone whose placement, contacts and money got them the leg up they needed to have their stuff accepted by the gatekeepers. The art itself wasn’t the art, it was the timing and the placement and the spirit. Also he clearly wasn’t doing it for the money. There should be grants for that sort of thing, or community whip rounds to buy the paint…
I’m very sad that he’s gone. Whatever you think of the medium, a prolific artist who changed the London landscape and went quite a long way, dead by suicide it seems. A loss. His tags, of course, will remain. Some of them probably for decades.
I don’t know who he was, I just know he was a Londoner. And … he pissed me off when I first became aware of him, so I examined myself. He gave a response. Helped me learn about myself a little bit. That’s art. My mum loved “Give Peas a Chance”. “How dare he trample on that institution,” was my kneejerk. Good work. Good work and thank you.
I’m sad he’s gone cos he brought us some colour and a bright mischief from a dark place. It’s hard to shine in the cracks. He managed it for decades. Fare forward.
