The Bradley Eros archive opened last night at the Sunview Luncheonette, a collaboration of our authors & friends et al. & Bradley Eros. Check out the Eros Library here: Eros Library.
VHS, abbreviation for the Video Home System, becomes, by transmigration, the Velvet Hermetic System. Bradley Eros’ video corpus is currently housed at the Sunview Luncheonette (http://thesunview.org/) as a watchable archive.
Primarily a stash of bootlegs and obsessive hoardings these videos totter on the brink of obsolescence. The archive contains a holy grail[1] of weirdness and subversive art collected while Eros lived in Chinatown and the East Village in the 80s and Williamsburg during the 90s.
The works in the VHS archive were traded, duped, dubbed, mixed, stolen or bartered one by one from friends, collectors, roommates, fellow artists, film departments, public libraries, microcinemas, fans, connoisseurs, snobs & fanatics, perverts & subverts, as well as associates, thieves & spies from Kim’s, Bard, NYU, Kino, re:voir, EAI, Facets, VDB, ETC (Experimental Television Center) or the late great Mystic Fire.
This Velvet Hermetic System, this erasable & decaying encasement of encoded signals, typically modeled on the junk shop or used book store is here more fancifully structured as analogous to the table of the elements in a science laboratory or the entomology cases or butterfly collection in the Natural History Museum. Among the rare specimens, re-enchanted through collective display and access, are essential and unessential film and video works[2], obscure and familiar movies, unique and forgotten art works, documents and experiments, some with hand-made covers and sleeves (all scanned for perusal and preview), all vying for shelf-space on this free-standing mobile magnetic field.