Revolve

“Nancy Holt’s Revolve, a videotape where the artist, off-camera, interviews her friend Dennis Wheeler who is dying of leukemia, uses his illness and mental reflection as a metaphysical site. Her interview is recorded from the perspective of three video cameras that each capture Wheeler from a different point of view. The three-point perspective was designed to give the illusion of infinity. Holt’s three-camera perspective grips the observer with the reality of the finiteness of death... The editing process is pendulous, dialectical—like Wheeler living on the borrowed time of chemotherapy, swinging from remission to illness.”

—Carrie Rickey, “Nancy Holt: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,” Arts Magazine 52 (November 1977)

Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.