Wendy Clarke: Love is All Around

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