Gerard Byrne - Whitechapel Gallery

Gerard Byrne, from A Man and a Woman Make Love, 2012

Gerard Byrne: A State of Neutral Pleasure, is at the Whitechapel Gallery until 8 March 2013.
Byrne works in video and photography. His signature works are filmed reconstructions of published discussions and interviews, including: 

1984 and Beyond (2005-7): a discussion between 12 science fiction writers, including Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, about their visions of the future, originally published by Playboy in the 1960s

Homme à Femmes (2004): an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1972

A man and a woman make love (2012): a discussion about sex by a group of  Surrealists, conducted in 1928

A thing is a hole in a thing it is not (2010): a radio interview with Minimalists Frank Stella, Don Judd and Dan Flavin, broadcast in 1964

Why it’s time for Imperial, again (1998-2002): a dialogue between Frank Sinatra and Lee Iacocca (chairman of Chrysler) discussing the merits of the 1981 Chrysler Imperial

What do Byrne's reconstructions add to the original texts? Critical responses suggest that  his multi-screen, theatrical stagings, employing (deliberately) wooden actors offer a stimulating, and occasionally hilarious, dislocation of past and present, a Brechtian distancing from the sometimes preposterous ideas and beliefs which underpin the ideologies of our times. Or something like that? It all looks pretty enagaging.
I am looking forward, in particular, to seeing A thing is a hole in a thing it is not which uses the original sound recording of Frank Stella, Don Judd and Dan Flavin discussing Minimalism, and presumably includes Stella's famous assertion of materialist aesthetics:

I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting – the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.It really is an object... If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion...What you see is what you see. 

Frank Stella in Glaser, Bruce and Lippard, Lucy R. (1966) "Questions to Stella and Judd", Art News, September, (discussion originally broadcast on WBAI-FM, New York, February 1964 as "New Nihilism or New Art?"), reprinted in Battcock, Gregory ed. (1968) Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, London: Studio Vista, pp157-8

The exhibition also includes still photographs from Byrne's series of pictures of newsstands and A country road. A tree. Evening - taking its title from the opening stage direction in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
Read reviews of the exhibition by Adrian Searle and Laura Cumming; see also article by Brian Dillon, and an interview in Tate Etc.

Gerard Byrne, from 1984 and Beyond 2005–7

Gerard Byrne, from 1984 and Beyond 2005–7

Gerard Byrne,Why it’s time for Imperial, again, 1998-2002

Gerard Byrne, from A thing is a hole in a thing it is not , 2010

Gerard Byrne, Four weeks and two days ago

Gerard Byrne, A country road. A tree. Evening

Shomei Tomatsu, 1930 - 2012

Shomei Tomatsu, Eiko Shima, 1961

Shomei Tomatsu died on 14 December 2012.
Time stopped at 11.02, 1945, Nagasaki - this was the moment the atomic bomb was exploded over Nagasaki, and is the title of Tomatsu's photograph of a watch halted at that moment. Melted Beer Bottle is another relic of that devastating explosion - a glass bottle contorted into a form which, as Sean O'Hagan, commented, at first glance... looks like a skinned cat or dog, perhaps even a suckling pig hanging outside a roadside restaurant. 

Shomei Tomatsu, Time stopped at 11.02, 1945, Nagasaki, 1961

Shomei Tomatsu, Beer Bottle after the Atomic Explosion, 1945, Nagasaki, 1961

Like all Japanese of his generation Tomatsu was unavoidably and indelibly marked by the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The pictures he made in the 1960s are a moving confrontation with that event and its aftermath. Tomatsu went on to become one of the great photographers in, and of, post-war Japan.
Read an obituary by Sean O'Hagan and an appreciation in Aperture.

Shomei Tomatsu, Prostitute, Nagoya, 1958

Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled, from series Chewing Gum and Chocolate, Yokosuka, 1959.

Shomei Tomatsu, Nagasaki, 1962

Shomei Tomatsu, untitled, 1969

Shomei Tomatsu, Eros, 1969

Shomei Tomatsu, untitled (Kadena), 1972

Shomei Tomatsu, untitled (Okinawa City), 1979

Giorgio Morandi - Estorick Collection

Giorgio Morandi: Lines of Poetry is at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art until 7 April 2013.
Morandi's modest, yet monumental, paintings and prints of bottles, pots and jugs are, I think, amongst the very great works of art of the twentieth century. Quiet, nuanced, beautiful. This is a rare chance to see a substantial exhibition of prints, mostly etchings, together with four late, almost abstract, watercolours.
Read reviews by Laura Cumming and Alastair Sooke.

Nadav Kander: Bodies. 6 Women, 1 Man - Flowers

Nadav Kander, Michael standing, 2010

Nadav Kander: Bodies, 6 Women, 1 Man is at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street until 9 February.
The bodies are coated in white marble dust and isolated against a dark background. Kander describes the work as an enquiry into what it feels like to be human.

Nadav Kander, Isley standing, 2010

Nadav Kander, Audrey with toes and wrist bent, 2011

Nadav Kander, Elizabeth with elbows hiding face, 2012

Nadav Kander, Michael curled away,  2012

Nadav Kander, Isley lying with white mouse on hip, 2012

Nadav Kander, Mengxi stamping, 2010

Nadav Kander, Michael curled with soft hand, 2012

Oscar Niemeyer, 1907 - 2012

Oscar Niemeyer, Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996

Oscar Niemeyer died on 5 December 2012.
It is extraordinary to realise that Niemeyer, who has died at the age of 104, was working closely with no less a figure than Le Corbusier more than 70 years ago; Niemeyer first encountered him in 1929 and again later in 1936.
Niemeyer's late work (completed 1996) the Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, is hailed as 

a modern triumph, something that deserves to be considered alongside such great buildings as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater; Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp and Mies van der Rohe's Farnworth house. (Glancey and Pawley)

However, Niemeyer's major monument will be the 'futuristic' city of Brasilia for which he designed all the principal public buildings.Many of these have become icons of Modernism. Not all commentators have been admiring. The late Robert Hughes (see below) was withering: in  Trouble in Utopia, a chapter in his essay on modern art, The Shock of the New, he wrote: 

Only one city in the West has ever been built from scratch along the strict, Corbusean schema of Utopian modernist town planning. Brasilia... was going to be the City of the Future - the triumph of sunlight, reason, and the automobile... It looked splendid in the drawings and photographs... The reality of the place is markedly less noble. Brasilia was finished... in 1960, and ever since then it has been falling to bits... It is a vast example of what happens when people design for an imagined Future, rather than for a real world.
Brasilia, in less than twenty years, ceased to be the City of Tomorrow and turned into yesterday's science fiction. It is an expensive and ugly testimony to the fact that, when men think in terms of abstract space rather than real place... they tend to produce miles of jerry-built nowhere... The experiment, one may hope, will not be repeated; the utopian buck stops here.(Robert Hughes (1980) "The Shock of the new", London: BBC, pp210-11)

For a more sympathetic and enthusiastic view, see obituary by Jonathan Glancey and Martin Pawley.

In 1987 Brasila was made a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, et al, Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro, 1950

Oscar Niemeyer, The National Congress, Brasilia, c 1960

Oscar Niemeyer , Cicillo Matarazzo pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, 1957 (?)

Oscar Niemeyer, The Centro Cultural Oscar Niemeyer in Asturias, Spain

Oscar Niemeyer, The Centro Cultural Oscar Niemeyer in Asturias, Spain

Oscar Niemeyer, auditorium in Ravello, Italy, 2009

Oscar Niemeyer, Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996