Making the "Love Tapes"

As a video artist, I have always been interested in using video as an interactive tool with myself and others. My mother, Shirley Clarke, gave me my first video equipment in 1972, and the first thing I did with it was to take a look at myself on the monitor and explore some possibilities provided by the immediate feedback. I started keeping a video diary and made entries in it for many years. I used the video diary as a tool for expressing my true feelings, needs, and wants, and to see if I was being honest. Most of the time the subject was about my current relationship and my feelings about love.

I made three successive 30-minute tapes (at that time, the tapes were reel-to-reel and 30 minutes long), watching each as I made it. Then I was all talked out. Up until this point, my diary was a place that was completely safe and private, but I had a feeling that there was something special about these tapes. I showed them to several people close to me, because I wanted to know if they were too personal to show to the public. I decided to show one of the 30-minute tapes, titled “Chapter One,” in a small room off the main gallery of my exhibition, Interactive Video, at the University of Southern California in San Diego’s Maderville Art Gallery. I included a guest book, and people wrote me long comments, telling me all about themselves and their experiences with love. This planted the seed.

“Love Tapes” began in 1977, when I showed “Chapter One” to a group of my mother’s graduate video students at UCLA. After seeing my tape, five people sat by themselves in the TV studio, looking at themselves on a monitor. I put on a record from the school library—“I’m in the Mood for Love”—and each person spoke spontaneously about his or her own feelings about love. The record was three minutes long, so that was the length of each tape. We all looked at the tapes played back, one after the other, and, thus, the format for the “Love Tapes” was born. One woman talked about how love was the smell of her granddaughter’s baby-powdered bottom. Another talked about how she has never found love and felt bad because she was “not sexy,” and hoped that she would find love in college, but had not. The tapes were open, honest, and amazingly eloquent. When I returned home that evening, I was elated—I could imagine the possibility of getting every person on the planet to add his or her own particular experience to the collection.

×

I started by seeking grants to make the tapes with as many people as possible from different backgrounds and cultures. I invited the participants to make tapes themselves, in which they sat alone in a room, facing their image on a monitor, and talking spontaneously about their personal feelings of love. After each made a tape, he or she looked back at it and decided whether to have it erased or to add it to the growing collection. As of 2006, about 2,500 people had added their unique contributions.

“Love Tapes” was first installed publicly at the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art. For that installation, I showed my “Chapter One” tape to gallery visitors in a small private room and then invited them to add their own tape. About 100 people did. 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.

After that exhibition, I retired my “Chapter One” tape and started to show the Los Angeles tapes to different groups of people. I made tapes with older African-American men and women from a variety of professions. The women talked about love as being the deep love of their woman friends. The women seemed to have ease about feeling love. One sang at the end of her tape and looked at herself and said, “I’m trying to look a little better on the television than I really look … baggy eyes … I love myself too …” I had always thought about love as romantic love, and I realized how narrow that was. Making these tapes was expanding my own understandings about love, which was very freeing.

I made tapes with a group of Latin American students who had just come to America to study filmmaking. In these tapes, the participants talked about love of mother and nature and family. I made tapes with a group of older people who talked about love in a more global way, in terms of loving the planet and wanting to help people. Another group were prison inmates. They talked of family love, and the importance of telling people that you love them while you are with them. Each different group added more to the vastness of the subject, and I edited different selections to show others, which kept open the expansiveness of possibilities.

Watching the 'Love Tapes' in the lobby of the World Trade Center, 1980

×

Watching the 'Love Tapes' in the lobby of the World Trade Center, 1980

One of my favorite experiences was having a booth at the World Trade Center in 1980. The project began when KCET Public Television aired a 45-minute version of a selection of “Love Tapes” and, after the show, invited the audience to come to the World Trade Center to add their tapes to the collection. Three hundred fifty-seven people came and made a “Love Tape.” All the local television stations and newspapers ran the story, and a red banner headline in the New York Post read, “NEW YORKERS LINE UP TO TELL THEIR LOVE SECRETS.” Our booth was in the lobby of Tower Two, opposite the elevator that took people to the observation deck and restaurant. People who worked in the World Trade Center would visit on their lunch hours to see the tapes that had been made. Many made tapes of their own, and several made more than one tape.

An old West Indian man made four tapes, in which he sang songs that he had written about love. He was very dapper, with a suit and tie and bowler hat. Sometimes he had his dentures in, and at other times he was toothless. It was astounding how open and personal everyone was, even in this heart of the financial and business world. A young teenager made a tape in which he talked about how he had never known love—that he had been brought up in foster homes and acted out in school, even hitting a teacher with a chair. But his last foster parents said that they wanted to adopt him, and he wanted to stay—he had finally found love. Another young man with sunglasses and a punk look talked about his first love with a girl named “Barbie” who wanted to find a guy who was like a “Ken” doll. She threw him out of an apple tree and said she just wanted to be friends. A man who worked for a business on one of the upper floors looked into the lens of the camera and said, “I have been waiting for 31 years to say this to the whole world: I love you, I love you very much.”

A physically disabled Japanese man made my favorite tape, in Japanese. He said he had just seen a documentary film about disabled people, and it made him remember an experience in his childhood. He was walking in the country with his schoolmates and his teacher. He had to wear a corset, which covered his upper body, and one of the boys was making fun of him. The bully pushed him, and he fell over and landed like an upside-down turtle. His teacher picked him up, put him on her back, and carried him the rest of the way. He remembered resting his face on her soft back. That made his heart melt, and he thought about the bully who maybe was not such a bad person.

I received many grants and made and exhibited the “Love Tapes” not only in the lobby of the World Trade Center, but also in a maximum security prison, a shelter for battered women, a van on the streets of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, and many other places. Eventually the project became too large for me to continue on my own, so in 1989, after I had the “Love Tapes” booth at the Exploratorium, I put the project to rest. Currently all 2,500 “Love Tapes” are in the Archives at UCLA, and I am patiently waiting for the project to reach its potential.

It has been my experience that it is critical to have people go through all stages of the process:

1. View “Love Tapes” made by others.
2. Choose your own music and background.
3. Sit alone in the room, facing your image on the monitor.
4. When the music starts playing, begin your tape. Talk spontaneously about your personal feelings and experiences with love for three minutes.
5. Watch your tape played back and decide whether or not you want to sign the release and add it to the growing collection.
6. See your “Love Tape” along with others who made a tape at the same session.

If people have the right to have their tape erased, they feel free to risk making a tape. If people do not watch their tape played back, they will walk away feeling isolation and shame. Going through the whole process is very cathartic and expansive.

I have noticed that people do not say what they are not ready to share, and that once having made their tape, they are ready to move on to a deeper level in their lives. In watching people share their tapes, I feel that they are expressing what is also deep in my heart, and as a result I feel more connected to the human experience.

This piece originally appeared in:

McLean, Kathleen, and Wendy Pollock, eds. Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions. Washington, DC: Association of Science-Technology Centers Inc, 2007. https://informalscience.org/research/visitor-voices-museum-exhibitions/