Love Tapes

This page includes videos that are currently stored within the WCFTR database and associated with the series: Love Tapes.

In 1977, Wendy Clarke shared her video diaries with Shirley’s graduate students at UCLA, which led five of them to create their own tapes. The format for the Love Tapes was a result of this session with the UCLA students: people watch other “love tapes” and then record their own by sitting in front of a camera and monitor so that they can look at themselves while they talk about love for three minutes. After recording their tape, the participant would view it and decide either to have it erased or to sign a release and add it to the collection. Between 1977 and 1989, over 2,500 tapes were made around the world, illustrating the vast range of interpretations, meanings, and memories prompted by the word “love.” Through this process, Wendy Clarke found that video operates as both an apparatus for intimacy and a facilitator for self-examination. The project’s scope revealed a rare glimpse of humanity communing through shared experience, albeit one mediated by video technologies of both recording and exhibition. Released on public television stations in the 1980s, the Love Tapes marked a milestone for the advancement of the medium. The Love Tapes have been exhibited extensively around the world since 1980, including shows at the Museum of Modern Art (1980), the World’s Fair in New Orleans (1984), on KCET/28 TV in Southern California (1989), as part of a Wendy Clarke retrospective at Anthology Film Archive in New York City (2001) and most recently at LUX in London, England (2019).