Wendy Clarke: Love is All Around
Programmed by Kristin MacDonough | TRT 90 mins | 1977 - 1983
VDB is pleased to celebrate Valentine's Day with Wendy Clarke's Love Tapes (2011) in a new VDB TV program! VDB's Archive and Collection Manager, Kristin MacDonough, has curated a selection of five excerpts from Clarke's iconic series Love Tapes, a collection of video recordings of 2,500 people from diverse backgrounds who share their personal feelings about love. This winter, Kristin spoke with the artist at length about the Love Tapes, and the interview has been made available to read here alongside the program.
Love, as described throughout the tapes, is not defined by any one singular meaning, but is instead contextualized by the variety of personal perspectives and experiences within this collection. Such interpretations of love explore lust, friendship, first love, and familial love. The Love Tapes project consists of dozens of edited tapes from 1977-2011, and is ongoing. VDB has released numerous iterations of the project in correspondence with various locales: Love Tapes: Chapter One (1977), Prison Love Tapes (1979), The Love Tapes: World Trade Center (1980), Love Tapes: First Years, Coast to Coast (1981), Love Tapes: Two Museums (1981), Love Tapes: Miami (1983), Love Tapes: Santa Monica Mall (1988), Anthology 23 Love Tapes (2023), and Losing the Plot Love Tapes (2024). This VDB TV program highlights Love Tapes recently remastered for preservation by Clarke and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"An older woman talked about how she had just fallen in love and it felt exactly the same as when she was 16. A young man said he did not want to feel love because it made his life too complicated. Another woman looked into the lens of the camera and talked as if she were talking to her lover, tearfully telling him how much she loved him. Each tape was unique: most people talked about romantic love and either the joy or pain of their experience."
— Wendy Clarke, making the Love Tapes, Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions, Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock, 2007
Featured Titles
"I got my first Sony Portapak in 1972 and started keeping a video diary. I sat facing my image on the monitor and talked about what was going on in my life. In 1977 I decided to talk about my current experience with love. I made one half hour tape and watched it play back. Then I made another and watched it play back, and one more... I was done fro now. What follows is the middle half hour and is the tape that I used to start the Love Tapes."
–Wendy Clarke
As of 2024, about 2,500 people have made a love tape.
A collection of love tapes made at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal prison in New York City. The videos are part of Wendy Clarke's ongoing project, Love Tapes.
The Love Tapes: World Trade Center is a collection of videos from Wendy Clarke's Love Tapes project. The project began in 1977 and is ongoing. Love, as described throughout the tapes, is not defined by any one singular meaning, but is instead contextualized by the variety of personal perspectives and experiences within this collection. Videos in this selection were recorded at a station the artist set up in the World Trade Center in 1980, open over the course of three weeks.
In Love Tapes: Two Museums, speakers from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Connecticut) and The Museum of Modern Art (New York) share their thoughts and memories of love. This video is part of Wendy Clarke's ongoing project, Love Tapes.
A collection of videos made at Miami-Dade Community College Mitchell Wolfson New World Center as part of Miami Waves Film Festival. The videos are part of Wendy Clarke's ongoing project, Love Tapes.
Resources
Read here: Wendy Clarke: Love is All Around