Ai Weiwei (photo courtesy of Otto Woods)
On the opening night of a new Ai Weiwei exhibition in Bologna, a visitor pushed over a sculpture, completely destroying it.
The incident occurred at the Palazzo Fava last Friday, September 20th, during the opening of Ai’s exhibition, his first-ever solo show in Bologna. Among the works on display was Porcelain Cube. Ai posted CCTV footage of the incident on his Instagram page, which shows the perpetrator knocking over the sculpture and holding a piece over his head in some sort of performance. Ai was in the next room when the destruction took place. “I rushed inside to find chaos.” He later called the act “unacceptable”, and lamented that additional security would not have prevented the sculpture’s destruction.
Following the incident, police arrested a 57-year-old Czech man named Vaclav Pisvejc. Arturo Galansino, the director of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence who also curated the Ai exhibition, told reporters that this is not the first time Pisvejc has caused a scene. He is an artist himself, mainly creating abstract portraits that seem like mixes between Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. In 2018, Galansino organized an event at the Palazzo Strozzi for the performance artist Marina Abramović. Pisvejc approached Abramović with a portrait of her that he had created, hitting her over the head with it. Pisvejc has pulled off other provocative stunts, including standing naked in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence until police took him away. In that same square, during an art show several months later, Pisvejc sprayed red paint onto Urs Fischer’s sculpture Big Clay #4, making a large spot that remained for some time. In 2022, Pisvejc set fire to the black shroud the city of Florence had draped over the copy of Michelangelo’s David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio (done in commemoration of the victims of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).
The exhibition, titled Who Am I?, explores Ai’s “constant tension between tradition and experimentation, preservation and destruction”. Several works featured in the exhibit deal with the theme of destruction, including Left/Right Studio Material and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Of course, with few exceptions, destroying a work of art is in poor taste regardless of the perpetrator’s reasons. But with China’s government increasingly putting its boot on the neck of the country’s cultural sector, damaging or destroying cultural items by a prominent Chinese dissident artist is in extremely poor taste. It almost trivializes the repression artists face at the hands of restrictive governments. Few people seem to support Pisvejc and his work, so this will make him an even greater social pariah. Actions like this make gallery and museum spaces seem unsafe when they are meant to provide a secure environment to exhibit and interact with art.