IT IS AN overcast late-spring afternoon, and I’m about to start a self-guided tour of London’s contemporary art scene. My aim is to test this book’s main hypothesis: is the art world really as identity-obsessed and politically correct as I claim it is? There is no statistical survey to be conducted, of course. The best I can do is to attend as many exhibit openings, gallery talks, screenings and the like as this city offers over the course of a few weeks.

What follows represents only a fraction of what I see and hear on my sojourns in the capital. Care to join me?

* * *

The tour starts at Gasworks, a painfully au courant contemporary gallery in Vauxhall, not far from the Oval Cricket Ground in the heart of London. Three framed posters hang on the wall outside the gallery just by the entrance. ‘NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. NO COUNTRY BY ITSELF,’ reads the first one. ‘IT’S TIME FOR ACTIVISM. REGISTER TO VOTE BEFORE 7TH JUNE AT GOV.UK/REGISTER-TO-VOTE.’

The background is starkly white, but the typeface recalls a familiar Brussels blue. With less than a month to go until Britons head to the polls for a referendum on their European Union membership, the gallery is campaigning to get the vote out. Another poster has a serene blue background and white typeface that reads: ‘What is lost is lost forever.’ Below that slogan, in smaller print: ‘Say you’re in if you’re in. This one’s important: If the UK leaves Europe it may spell the end of the largest peace project in human history. It’s not about “same old” but about pulling through together. Register to vote before June 07.’ The third poster: ‘A ONCE IN A GENERATION DECISION. BE SURE NOT TO MISS YOUR VOTE.’

The posters, the Gasworks website informs visitors, are the work of German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who ‘aims to work toward maximising turnout among younger voters by focusing on voter registration’. The gallery is evasive about its own stance on Brexit, perhaps because Gasworks is partly taxpayer-funded. But in case the slogans on the posters leave any doubt, a statement from Tillmans clarifies: ‘Brexit could effectively spell the end of the EU. It’s a flawed and problematic institution, but on the whole it stands for a democratic worldview, human rights and favours cooperation over confrontation. It could prove to be a one-in-a-generation moment.’

Now, I favoured the Remain side in the debate over Brexit. I even agreed with Tillmans that Brexit might ‘result in a cascade of problematic consequences and political fall-out’, not least because the ‘weakening of the EU is a goal being actively pursued by strongmen like Vladimir Putin and European parties on the far right’. As an American, I would have preferred for Britain to have a seat in the councils of Europe, and to press for EU reform from the inside.

All that is beside the point: what aesthetic or cultural purpose is served when our art is so overtly politicised? Or when galleries weaponise their cultural capital in this way?

Such sloganeering-as-art has been around for a while. In the mid-1980s, for example, the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist graphic-arts collective, produced a series of posters highlighting sex disparities in the American art world. You can catch some of them at the Tate Modern. ‘WHICH ART MAG WAS WORST FOR WOMEN LAST YEAR?’ asked one of the posters. Then it ranked five prominent contemporary art magazines on the percentage of ‘features, projects and one-person show reviews on women artists Sept. 1985–Summer 1986’. (Our friends at Artforum ranked second-worst, with just 16 per cent.)

The Guerrilla Girls’ posters weren’t exactly great graphic art, but at least they were provocative and fun in an in-your-face way. Tillmans’s posters are merely preachy and dour. At any rate, they would fail to tip the balance in Remain’s favour: turnout among young people aged eighteen to twenty-four was 64 per cent (and 65 per cent among 25–39-year-olds). Youth turnout didn’t suffice to stave off Brexit.

* * *

Let’s step inside Gasworks. The main show is titled ‘Second Sex War’. The artist is London-based Sidsel Meineche Hansen, whose multimedia pieces, according to the exhibition notes, ‘foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a “techno-somatic variant of institutional critique”’. Your guess is as good as mine as to what that means, but one thing is clear: we are now fully immersed in identitarian waters.

The centrepiece of ‘Second Sex War’ is a digital flat screen hanging from a wooden structure – a sort of dominatrix’s torture rack. The structure, the exhibit notes helpfully explain, is supposed to evoke the subculture of ‘Bondage and Discipline (BD), Dominance and Submission (DS), Sadism and Masochism (SM)’. On the flat screen, a CGI animation loops. It shows a female humanoid figure, bald with round, mirror-like glasses for eyes, stroking an intimidating laser penis (or strap-on) that extends from her crotch like a blue flame. Later, she uses her lightsaber/strap-on to penetrate what looks like a formless hunk of flesh and tissue. All this is set to the rhythm of dark, tribal house music blaring from subwoofers under the BDSM rack.

The humanoid is named EVA v3.0, and she is a ‘royalty-free product sold online by TurboSquid, a company that supplies stock 3D models for computer games and adult entertainment’. The lightsaber/strap-on piece, titled ‘DICKGIRL 3D(X)’, borrows the ‘genitalia props’ used in CGI porn to ‘explore post-human porn production from within’. More generally, Meineche Hansen uses EVA v3.0 to ‘explore the overlap between subjects in real life and objects in virtual reality, focusing on their accumulation by capital through the gender binary’. You can also watch the same video on a gaming PC while relaxing on a beanbag (made of vegan leather, naturally).

The exhibit notes supplied by Gasworks are remarkable for stuffing seemingly every identity politics cliché into a relatively short document. Edgy material about ‘post-human’ pornography – check! Queer theory disquisitions on bodies and the gender binary – check! Vaguely anti-capitalist sentiments and rage against ‘accumulation’ – check!

Other items in ‘Second Sex War’ include ‘No Right Way to Cum’, another looping video featuring EVA v3.0, this time showing her masturbating and spraying female ejaculate at the camera (‘made in response to the British Board of Film Classification’s recent ban on female ejaculation in UK-produced pornography’ and ‘inspired by pro-sex feminists such as Deborah Sundahl and Susie Bright, the former editors of On Our Backs, the first lesbian erotica magazine run by women for women’). Then there’s the crude, childish drawing of a women lying down or asleep, with a crossed-out foetus in the thought bubble next to her – get it? – and another one showing EVA v3.0 with her erect member. And so on.

Are these images and objects meant to provoke reflection on the dehumanising effects of virtual-reality porn? Or celebrate how such porn might expand the horizons of human sexuality? Do these digital piles of flesh going at each other alert us to the virtual degradation that surrounds us all? Or tempt us to join in? Who knows? What matters is that the ‘illegibility’, degradation and relentless ugliness on display here are signs of virtue, because they are validated by the latter-day magisterium of identity politics.

* * *

New venue, new medium. A double-decker takes me from Vauxhall to London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, just off Trafalgar Square. I’m here for the ICA’s 2016 Artists’ Film Biennial, ‘a five-day celebration of artists’ film and moving image’, as the festival’s programme says. It adds: ‘Themes of social and political identity permeate the content and subjects explored by the biennial participants. These themes underpin moving image’s relevance in 2016.’

No kidding. Seemingly every screening, workshop and talk at the festival has identity politics at its centre. The dead giveaway, before attending any screening, is Michel Foucault’s fingerprint – that dreadful prose style, the conceptual poppycock – stamped all over the programme.

A curators’ workshop is co-taught by Fatima Hellberg, who previously curated at Electra, a London ‘contemporary art agency with a long-running dedication to gender and feminism’. Hellberg also participates in a question-and-answer session on the work of the American feminist filmmaker Ellen Cantor (1961–2013), who ‘combined readymade materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions of personal desire and institutional violence … Magnetised by the doleful naivety of characters such as Snow White and Bambi, Cantor would extend their narrative horizons to include vivid sexual encounters.’

A screening session titled ‘Always Already Yes’ comes the next day. The theme is addiction, which curator Tim Steer sees as

a counterfeit in the economy of desire, with enjoyment produced outside the circulation of social practices. The addicted subject is provisional, porous, inessential, performative. It is a community without asserting an identity. The addicted user circumvents the social reality of consumptive capitalism because the supplement (in whatever form or activity – sexual, consumer, chemical etc.) can produce a biologically absolute enjoyment. The subject therefore bypasses and redirects the previous subject/object relations and reinvests them in a new closed system, the body.

No doubt Tim Steer thinks this gobbledygook is the height of profundity, and surely at least one person would agree: Sidsel Meineche Hansen, of ‘DICKGIRL 3D(X)’ fame at Gasworks, who is screening a different film at his session.

The next day, a talk on ‘Political Identity and the Moving Image’, which explores ‘how political identities are depicted and captured with the moving image’. The day after that, ‘In the (Commercial) Break’, a programme of moving images, selected by the American artist Martine Syms, on such themes as ‘radical politics’ and ‘black aesthetics’, ‘politics as something you do with your body’ and the ‘black radical tradition’. (The ICA is also hosting a multimedia exhibition by Syms that considers, among other things, photography’s role ‘as a colonial tool’.)

And the day after, a series of academic presentations aimed at, among other things, ‘understanding both emergent forms of mediated fragmentation, as well as emergent forms of mediated politics’. That’s followed by a screening of moving images selected by Radclyffe Hall, a ‘concomitant group of artists and writers dedicated to exploring culture, aesthetics and learning through the lens of contemporary feminism’.

Among the selected films is ‘YOU ARE BORING’, which ‘discusses the troublesome nature of “looking” and “being looked at” within … queer representational politics’. Plus, a film titled ‘Party for Freedom’, on the ‘increasingly phobic natures of Western societies (homo-, islamo-, xeno-, to name a few)’. And immediately following that, concluding the festival’s programme, ‘a screening selected by Ming Wong, an artist working with performance, video and installation to explore cinematic histories and the politics of gender and representation’.

It is almost inconceivable that so many filmmakers could think of nothing – be inspired by nothing – nothing, nothing, nothing – but the politics of representation, ‘performativity’, gender, race, queer theory etc. There must be other subjects, in the world outside or in their inner lives, which belong on the silver (or digital) screen. This degree of conformity is unsettling. It should alarm cultural elites rather than comfort them. Yet the art world’s ideological atmosphere is so thick and pervasive that those inside it don’t even realise it as the air they breathe.

Forgive me, I forgot to mention one other permissible topic: ‘consumptive capitalism’, that oppressive economic system which creates vast sums of taxable wealth, which in turn allows the UK government to fund even this nonsense.

* * *

I attend a screening/talk titled ‘Social Identity and the Moving Image’. (The title is slightly different from the one on ‘Political Identity and the Moving Image’ mentioned earlier.) This one is dedicated to ‘exploring the role of the moving image as a device for defining and constructing social identities and the ways these topics are perceived within a wider social context’.

The panellists include Jamie Crewe, who is described in the programme as ‘an artist, a singer, and a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte’s head’. A cocotte, as in fireproof crockery, I wonder, or a female prostitute? Or both?

Joining Crewe is Rehana Zaman, whose work ‘considers the interplay of multiple social dynamics that constitute subjects along particular socio-political formations. These narrative-based artworks, often deadpan and neurotic, are generated through conversation and collaboration with others.’ Moderating is Ed Webb-Ingall, a writer-filmmaker ‘with an interest in exploring histories, practices and forms of collectivity and collaboration’ whose ‘current research examines the ways in which video technology operated within social contexts and how concepts of mobility and access interact with political platforms of community-based activism and forms of representation’.

Zaman’s and Webb-Ingall’s artist statements, and that of every other filmmaker and curator represented at the ICA biennale, orbit around the same concepts. Note everywhere the gratuitous pluralisation – ‘subjectivities’, ‘identities’, ‘histories’, ‘social contexts’, and so on ad infinitum – a linguistic tick, borne of the need to signal identitarian virtue: you’re in-the-know if you recognise that there is no single history or collectivity, that subjectivity is multiple, that identities can’t be reduced to one other and so on.

You could swap these artist statements around, and none would be the wiser. You could even swap the art itself, and it would probably escape most viewers’ notice.

Rehana Zaman’s short film, Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena, is set in a women’s beauty salon. In between tightly framed shots of women giving and receiving pedicures, Zaman’s subjects – mostly black and Asian women – recount encounters with everyday racism and sexism. One woman speaks of reading the great books and realising that ‘white men and the journeys of white men have nothing to do with me’. Too many women, she says, fail to ‘challenge the structures that exist’.

At first, these interviews have an intimate, vérité feel – until other women say the exact same lines about ‘white men and journeys of white men’ and failing to ‘challenge the structures that exist’. We are dealing with authored text in at least some of these cases, not authentic disclosure. The accounts of oppression culminate in one woman’s story about how, while she was on a date at a restaurant with a young man, one of the other diners choked on a piece of food. The young man saved the diner’s life in a heroic moment, we learn, but his date (our subject) felt marginalised because he subsequently became the centre of attention for an admiring crowd. She became invisible.

I keep wishing Zaman would capture women in these communities in a naturalistic, documentary form, inviting them to say what is really on their minds. Somehow I suspect the result wouldn’t meet her ideological needs.

Jamie Crewe’s film, Chantal After James Bidgood and Jean Genet, is more esoteric. ‘Inspired by filmmaker James Bidgood’s failed pornographic adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Balcony,’ the artist’s website says, ‘the video alters the story of Genet’s play to let the character Chantal live and win.’

I won’t bother unwrapping the layers of allusion and homage to Genet, the French poet, playwright and apologist for Palestinian terrorism. Needless to say, Chantal After James Bidgood and Jean Genet is as heavy-handed, ideologically, as Zaman’s beauty-salon excursion: early on, the Chantal character breaks a crucifix into pieces and sets fire to some sort of altar with icons. This is meant to shock – and would, had the left-wing art world not already given us Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ (1987) and Chris Ofili’s elephant-dung Virgin Mary (1996). Mostly the film is just bad. It feels like a student video getting play at premier London arts institution.

The discussion that follows the screening makes the Artforum folks sound like models of lucidity and clear thinking. You will instantly recognise the Artforum lexicon. What follows is just a sample. As you read, try to add the necessary ‘up-speak’ that is a hallmark of millennial talk, whereby a sentence that begins as a declarative is inflected into an interrogative at the end – e.g., I am writing this book so you can, like, read it?

CREWE: I think there’s something, um, well, it’s, um – how you interact with a public is really interesting, in terms of our practice and identity and, uh, the way that things are, like, visible, or, like, invisible. And the way you can, kind of, construct that in a practice … Without wanting to be trite, it does, like, weirdly, like, synchronise with thoughts about, like, how much you want to be seen, in terms of, like, thoughts about identity, uh, thinking about the stakes of visibility and invisibility, legibility and obtuseness [sic]. It’s been a funnily, um, synchronised thing for me. Yeah, and so, it’s one of those things, where I feel, like, the kind of methodology of my practice and the way I make artwork to be seen is really informed by the same, like, emotional things that go into, like, legibility, visibility, in terms of, like, gender identity, with me…

ZAMAN: I guess I’m trying to be aware of, um, not only being aware of what the relationship of representation is, but also how that feeds into the wider structure, so if there’s a screening fee how that fee might be divided among a group of domestic workers who are in that film, or if I’m invited to speak about that film, that the invitation might go to those people as well to speak. I suppose it’s an archaic question to want that to be thought about. But I suppose if there’s a situation where someone is making a film about Black Lives Matter or something, then I would find it really strange [if] it completely reinforces the structures of oppression rather than undo them, despite the fact that the context is that it’s setting out to undo it … I guess it’s a tension…

CREWE: There’s, like, a presumption at times that, like, artwork should reach outwards in general and be accessible, and, I’ve been questioning that … because I feel antagonised by my own general public, um, like, seeing the work. So who was the work – who was I aiming at? Um, but again, it’s, like, something that changes from work to work, and yeah, you find yourself grinding through, certainly for me maybe not at a conscious level, it is really to do [with] legibility and dialects … One of the things I try to do – one of the things I talk about – is registers as well in a moving-image work but also a work generally … Multiple methodologies going on, uh, yeah, which is something that I, kind of, initially thought of as part of, uh, as a lineage of queer methodologies, where you have parody, confessional, just a variety of methods to challenge some dominant structure, one of which is a parody, which is often about, like, recreating violences in an exaggerated way.

This talk could have gone on for days and months without illuminating anything in particular. I will stop here – for your sake and mine.

I pity these artists. They obviously aren’t untalented. There are glimpses of beauty in their films: Crewe uses Mylar sheets to distort the camera’s gaze, creating fascinating abstract forms and vibrant bursts of colour out of figurative objects; Zaman shows a deep appreciation for the lived-in female body, and the stories and emotions such bodies convey. But their curiosity is limited by politics: identitarian politics takes away their freedom to explore great big questions in an uninhibited way, without pre-determined answers and concepts. Foucault, hardline feminism and queer theory wrap their art like a straitjacket. If their English grammar sounds broken, it is because their creative grammar is, too, and the source of the brokenness is the same.

During the question-and-answer session, I ask the two artists if they ever conceive projects with any non-political concerns in mind, if beauty and formal perfection are ever at the forefront of their agenda or even at stake. They look at me like I’m from the planet Mars and answer, in so many words: No.

* * *

The next destination takes me to the South London Gallery in Camberwell. The medium shifts, too, from film to dance. The SLG is hosting French dancer Paul Maheke in conversation with his Brooklyn-based colleague niv Acosta. The topic is – you guessed it – the interplay of ‘dance and identity politics’.

Identity politics over the past few years has taken on a therapeutic aspect. Identitarians increasingly demand ‘safe spaces’, where they are shielded from criticism, sources of trauma are suppressed, and those inside can enforce segregation along lines of race, gender and sexuality. These therapeutic notions are making universities on both sides of the Atlantic ever more illiberal, and they are now bleeding into the art world, as well.

All this is on full display at the SLG’s event on dance and identity politics. Much as multimedia art is strictly a feminist enterprise for Meineche Hansen, and film is strictly identitarian at the ICA, so Maheke and Acosta wield dance like a weapon. Maheke’s choreography, his biography says, is ‘grounded in emancipatory and decolonial thought with an emphasis on cultural identities and new subjectivities. His current research focuses – through video, installation, sculpture and furtive interventions – on the body as both an archive and a territory, as a utopia to be reimagined through different strategies of resistance.’

We see a short video of one such ‘decolonial’ project: A young woman ‘twerks’ at the camera, as a four-on-the-floor beat ripples thump, thump, thump. (The twerk, for those who don’t know, is a hip-hop dance, in which the dancer squats low to the ground and rapidly thrusts and gyrates the derrière.) Every few frames, an intertitle flashes political slogans drawn from what Maheke calls his ‘fictional manifesto’: ‘…look into the face of the powers aligned against us…’ – thump, twerk, thump – ‘…an intricate inventory of rage…’ – thump, twerk, thump – ‘…we are discovering how furious and resistant some pieces of us are…’ – thump, twerk, thump – ‘…this is no longer time of [sic] wasting…’ The dance, Maheke says, is about ‘addressing white supremacy and talking about twerk, the political virtues of twerk’.

Acosta, meanwhile, melds art and activism inspired by ‘his intersectional identities as transgender, queer, and black-dominican’, according to his biography (he also rebels against capitalising proper nouns). His current practice, he says, ‘started as a research project on the intersection of disco, ideology, science-fiction, astrophysics and the black-American experience’. The ultimate goal is to create a safe space in which Acosta and his collaborators can be ‘relaxed and together and without interruption’ – by which he means free from ideological discomfort.

‘This idea of brown spaces is super-interesting,’ Acosta says. ‘Imagine if this room were a brown room, what would that feel? I just want you to resonate with that for a second.’ After a few seconds, during which members of a mostly white audience shift awkwardly in their seats, Acosta recounts performing in a 2013 piece staged by the famed postmodernist choreographer Deborah Hay at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Working with Hay, Acosta says, was ‘super-fucking-problematic’.

For the piece, titled ‘Blues’, Hay hired two separate casts of ten dancers of colour and ten white dancers, whom she called the ‘blue blacks’ and ‘blue whites’, respectively. ‘So we were working on this project with this white, elderly woman,’ Acosta recalls, ‘and we’re talking about “feeling the cells in our bodies and moving and going crazy.”’ Yet the two groups of dancers, Acosta says, weren’t informed of each other’s existence until the day of the performance.

When he asked Hay to explain the racialised nature of the casting, Acosta says, the choreographer responded with: ‘Because I wanted there to be a stark contrast with the white walls of the space. I wanted to bring colour into the room.’ Audible gasps reverberate at the London gallery as Acosta recounts this.

‘MoMA is white as fuck,’ he goes on. ‘That’s not a diss. It’s an attraction for Europeans. It’s a big attraction for white Americans. It is often a very white space. And that can translate into a violent space.’ The London audience nods knowingly at the claim that MoMA – as PC and liberal as American institutions come – is a swamp of racial bigotry. ‘Basically what ended up happening was that we found out about the white cast literally the day before the show,’ Acosta goes on, ‘and their rule was totally different from ours. They formed around us, like essentially enclosed us’ – another gasp – ‘while we were being whatever the fuck we wanted to be.’

So far, Acosta has portrayed his former choreographer as a latter-day D. W. Griffith. Then Acosta pulls back a bit. ‘This person [Hay] was realizing the idea of brown space,’ he says, ‘but in a way that was harmful to the community, because she first of all was not a brown woman and second of all, she was being sneaky and she did not hold a racial analysis.’ When confronted by her cast, Acosta says in a mock-Hay voice, ‘She was like, “Uh, uh, I didn’t think about race – what are you talking about?”’

* * *

I subsequently email Hay about the controversy surrounding ‘Blues’, and her account differs from Acosta’s. Hurricane Sandy, which ripped through New York City just before the piece was to be performed, severely restricted practice time. To explain the widely reported ill will that the piece generated among the cast, Hay says there was very little ‘collective processing following our practice at the museum (the only time we had as a cast together) because cars, hired by the museum (because no buses or trains were in service) were waiting to take the dancers home as well as bring them back the next day’.

Hay’s explanation for the apparently racially segregated casting is this: ‘Blues’ was always intended to be a piece with a cast of colour at its centre. The ‘blue whites’ were to be at MoMA mostly to ‘practise quietude in the lobby of the museum before the audience went upstairs to the Atrium to see the dance’. In other words, the ‘blue whites’ were to provide a sort of frame for the movements of the ‘blue blacks’. The whites were ‘creating an ambiance’ prior to the performance. The piece wasn’t mainly about them.

To support her claim, Hay forwards the choreographic notes she emailed to the ‘blue whites’ ahead of the performance. It reads in relevant part:

I think of you as grounding the space through your practice. Your presence helps ground the blue black cast additionally. Whether or not audience draws from you similarly is not the issue. You are at work in dance in this setting … You will create a performing site by forming an enclosed area that can be circular or not. You are free to indicate that individual audience members step out of the way of the mutually created enclosed space.

Her instructions to the ‘blue blacks’, meanwhile, suggest that she thought of the piece as a critique of the norms of Western dance and an attempt to forge relationships across identitarian divides. They read in relevant part:

Acosta doesn’t respond to my follow-up questions on the apparent discrepancies between his and Hay’s accounts of the controversy.

There is little doubt that Hay fumbled some of the personnel politics of ‘Blues’. The ‘blue whites’ complained of being paid less than the ‘blue blacks’, for one thing, though Hay says this is because they were merely there to practise quietude, and were initially thought of as only volunteers. The notion that the ‘blue blacks’ might provide melanin contrast with MoMA’s starkly white walls, corroborated by other cast members after the fact, isn’t evidence of racism, but it does evoke a certain exoticisation of black skin.

Then again, any piece of art that attempts to cross racial boundaries – something liberals used to encourage – is going to involve some awkwardness. Had it been the ‘blue blacks’ providing the framing and quietude, the PC crowd would surely have raged at Hay for having people of colour provide a backdrop for white people taking centre-stage. We can assume the worst about Hay’s intentions, and dismiss a great deal of evidence that she meant well. We can denounce Hay, as Acosta does, for making controversial casting decisions on mainly aesthetic grounds. But before going down the route of judgement and condemnation, we might consider all the other pieces of art that would be foreclosed if the identitarians had their way.

Is it better to have a segregated art world, where everyone is always comfortable and safe – or one in which artists embrace the spirit of encounter, even if it means a measure of discomfort? niv Acosta seems to embrace the latter, but he wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Acosta sees Hay’s efforts to cross boundaries as an intrusion into ‘brown space’. Meanwhile among Acosta’s own recent projects is one in which he lies seductively on the floor and asks a mostly white audience to count as he twerks more than a thousand times – one twerk for every African-American killed by the police in the US in 2015.