Frieze. March 08.

In the new issue, frieze co-editor Jörg Heiser notes that about 100 yards separate that set of stone steps in Philadelphia Rocky runs up triumphantly and Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'éclairage: "This connection between [Sylvester] Stallone's famed filmic moment and Duchamp's final work would be negligible if it wasn't for the fact that the figure in Étant donnés holds up a lamp; a gesture that corresponds with Rocky's. In their own ways, both frame the contradictions of the American Dream – its desires and frustrations, its confusions of sex and power – as seen through the eyes of an expatriate French artist and the son of an Italian blue-collar immigrant.

Polly Staple considers "the shifting nature of public art" via the examples of Pawel Althamer's Film, Seth Price's essay "Dispersion" and Paul Chan's New Orleans production of Waiting for Godot.

Peter Doig writes this month's "Life in Film" column; you do have to register to read it, but it's free. Doig and a Trinidadian artist, Che Lovelace, run the StudioFilmClub in Port of Spain. They've chosen some fine films, have a dedicated audience, and what's more, Doig paints posters for most of the films they screen. In Trinidad. Sounds like a life.

"You could argue that [Roxy Music] - never a world stadium act, never a commercial success at the [David] Bowie level - were nonetheless crucial in defining so much of the attitude and aesthetic that are mainstream Postmodern UK," writes Peter York. "And you could go on to argue that their particular kind of dandyism was socially conservative and even contributed to the Thatcher mood. You could argue all those things, but Michael Bracewell doesn't in his book Re-make/Re-model (Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music). He knows the readers can do that for themselves. He starts from the assumption that Roxy Music's first album is very important in the great scheme of things, and that his readers know it."

"Since 2006, Hongjong Lin has been re-imagining [George] Psalmanazar in a series of new guises, from architect to linguist," writes Douglas Heingartner after telling the story of the 18th century impostor. "And in his video installation Yeeha Formosa (a pun on the original Portuguese name for the island [of Taiwan]), exhibited during the recent International Film Festival Rotterdam, Lin reinvented Psalmanazar as an international fashion designer."

Also: Brian Dillon on Donald Barthelme, Ross Wilson on Walter Benjamin, Tirdad Zolghadr on class and, of course, much more.

Posted by dwhudson at February 25, 2008 1:02 PM