Love, Links, Archives
Since the early-1970s, Wendy Clarke has expanded the possibilities of using video as a medium for artistic expression and human connection. Her projects, including the Love Tapes, The Link, and One on One, invited people from a wide range of backgrounds to share their stories, insights, feelings. Encompassing hundreds of hours of footage, from across over a dozen video formats, the Wendy Clarke collection represents a unique audiovisual archive of American life. The WCFTR is pleased to be able to share the collection–now digitized, searchable, and richly described–with new audiences, allowing the voices within it to speak to us again.
Search the Collection
Exhibits
Inmates
Ashton Leach
Starting in 1979, Clarke went into different prisons and correctional facilities to give inmates the opportunity to make their own love tape. No matter their past, in this space crafted for love, they are equal with those outside of the correctional facilities; the men in the videos still speak of love in the same enthusiastic, awe-struck, and confused manner as the visitors of the World Trade Center or a museum patron.
LGBTQ Representation in Wendy Clarke’s Video Projects
Matt St. John
Wendy Clarke’s video art from the 1970s through the 1990s portrays the queer community at a time of increased openness, alongside immense tragedy and loss caused by HIV/AIDS. This exhibit focuses on the projects that most frequently involve LGBTQ people: Love Tapes, Growing Up Gay: The Out Tapes, and Remembrance.
Encountering New Media
Ben Pettis
What is the relationship between technology and the self? The Wendy Clarke collection is an incredibly thorough collection of how people reacted to seeing themselves on video for the first time.
About the collection
Today, Wendy Clarke’s video projects remain powerful works of art. In creating her art, she defied prior notions of media production and generated a powerful archive in the process. As the caretaker for Wendy Clarke's collection, the WCFTR completed an inventory of nearly 1,208 tapes, and in consultation with the filmmaker, identified around 900 of those tapes to be the originals and the most significant to the collection. Given the volatility of magnetic tape, digitizing these tapes was a top priority.
There are 14 unique video formats in the collection
Each format has distinct challenges for care, preservation, and digitization.
In addition to thousands of hours of video, Wendy Clarke's collection at the WCFTR also includes newspaper clippings, program notes, ephemera from various evens, and other paper records. As part of this project, the WCFTR has digitized a selection of these materials to make available for online viewing.
Endless Love Tapes
Early in her career, Wendy Clarke stated, “if you could have every person on the planet make a love tape, then you’d really know what it’s like to be human.” It is with this passion and belief in the benefit of providing people the space to reflect on love that Wendy’s latest project was created: The Endless Love Tapes. More than a mere expansion of the video collection, these tapes aim to take the Love Tapes worldwide in a way not previously seen.
Not only does this iteration expand geographically boundaries of the project, but it also releases the project of any temporal constraints. The Endless Love Tape's goal is to be just that– a perpetual creation of tapes, an everlasting conversation about love, and the preservation of the emotional vulnerability of everyone who has ever made a love tape gifted audiences. The Endless Love Tapes is a manual that provides strategies for continuing the production of Love Tapes without Wendy’s direct oversight. By utilizing contemporary technology, the Love Tapes can become infinite, moving us closer to Clarke's original goal of knowing the world through the people who love on it.
Many thanks to everyone who has believed in and supported this project.
