This leads us to the decision to hold the installation in the Palazzo Strozzi, commissioned by Filippo Strozzi in 1491. His life began tragically, his father Matteo Strozzi's political and familial ties led him to be banished by the Medici family. After his fathers death, Filippo was left alone in Palermo at the age of thirteen. So far the political victim parallel rings true. However, as R.A. Goldthwaite highlights Filipo's extraordinarily Palazzo was not a political gesture but a "public display of private status". Filippo served as little time in political office as could be expected of a leading guild figure and had worked closely with Lorenzo de' Medici, even providing him with a loan. Rather than becoming a symbol of victim-hood, the Palazzo Strozzi should be held up as a monument to mankinds irrepressible will-power to flourish. From a bereaved exile he was able to return to his home and establish his family to prominence and status through this building. While Weiwei feels righteous enough to pose on the beach as the drowned Syrian refugee boy, called Alan Kurdi, Filippo had a conflicted sense of morality. He commissioned the breathtaking family chapel at St Maria Novella, its frescoed walls utilise images from 'The Divine Comedy'- in the iciest depths of hell are those guilty of the sin of usury, an occupational hazard in the banking industry! Thus we see that Filippo Strozzi was not a righteous and confident dissident as Weiwei seeks to portray himself, he was it seems, a complex and undemonstrative creator, a builder.
The exhibitions attempt to delve into the relationship between "tradition and modernity" went as far as to drop tradition, literally. The three images of Weiwei dropping the Han dynasty vases has to be one of the most sickening images from the art world. A tragic inversion of his 'teacher' Marcel Duchamp's aim to create beauty from the domestic, Weiwei destroyed the exceptional to indulge the domestic. Strozzi commissioned as his chief stonemason a man called Cronaca primarily because he had studied in Rome and was familiar with classical design. In case Weiwei had forgotten the Renaissance was based entirely on a desire to preserve and recreate the cultural flowering of Europe in antiquity. This failure of modernity to respect the dignity of the past was encapsulated by his portraits of 'fellow' rebels. Machiavelli; the man who wrote the manual on how to be a tyrant, Dante, who wrote 'De Monarchia' proposing a Universal Monarchy which sounds awfully similar to the United Front of the People's Republic of China. The only one he shares a similarity with is Savanorola, the austere monk who also liked destroying priceless artwork. This embarrassing attempt to modernize the past in the medium of lego bricks. An infantile idea made with a children's toy. Using historical techniques and mediums to depict contemporary objects were more successful, the marble CCTV guarding the door and the jade hand-cuffs both had an aesthetic and political impact. The irony of using semi-permanent mediums to items you hope will be abolished did not seem to inform his art. Weiwei's caution to really challenge and provoke the Renaissance and pompous western artistic traditions was frustrating, apart from an ornate Rococo wallpaper set with twitter logos and surveillance cameras. For such a 'provocative' artist he did little to illuminate any challenge on Western art.
Thought-provoking, challenging and political are all words you are expected to exclaim solemnly as you leap onto your white charger and race to the nearest social media site to post some protest you signed about saving something, anything! How political can art be? It's a question this article is not equipped to answer. Yet after visiting Libero one suspects not really. Looking at art has to be one of the most passive acts a person can do. Weiwei is at times revealing and what he reveals is indeed shocking. For instance the 'Snake Bag' on the walls made from school children's backpacks who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake is harrowing and horrific, as is Weiwei's accusation that local government corruption led to vulnerable school constructions. But this does not mean that a single person who entered the gallery will leave knowing what they can do to reform Chinese building legislation. He can be defended as providing an international conscience but Thomastic 'Conscientia' involved both acknowledging right and wrong and then acting upon it. Art should act as a mirror to the conscience; making one feel impotent and useless to solve the world's ills would be fine if everyone didn't leave feeling so damn smug about visiting it in the first place!
There were moments when Weiwei did achieve success. His installation on the outside side of the Palazzo hung with lifeboats similar to those used by migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean mimicked the form of Renaissance arches. The rusticated stones looked like violent waves under the boats. Strozzi would have admired those who move away from home in order to save the home, he would have recognised himself. The final room contained a section of the Shanghai studio ordered to be torn down by the authorities. It was a fitting final ending, in Filippo Strozzi's will he ordered that the family never lose the house and they did not until the 20th century. The pace of modernity outstripped tradition, time should be respected not glamourised. I wish that Ai Weiwei remembered that.
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