The conversion of the Castle of Good Hope from the headquarters of the Cape garrison and the symbol of the apartheid army to a continually productive site for art making is among the most striking successes of Iziko Museums. In the past 10 years the complex has seen both major site-specific exhibitions and major parties — most recently the Mother City Queer Project’s “wedding” bash. This weekend the head-scratching and the vinyl-scratching converge at YDEsire, fourth of the annual Softserve parties staged by art organisation Public Eye. As the last event demonstrated, Softserve has grown beyond the capacity of the South African National Gallery to host it; concerns about fire regulations, maintenance and the integrity of the gallery’s collections split the party from the art and resulted in epic queues.
This time it looks like it is the scope of the event that will be epic. YDEsire will occupy the entire castle: there are nine indoor galleries, three outdoor art spaces, two dance floors and 120 participating artists, including Kevin Brand, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Jean Brundrit, Warrick Sony, Doreen Southwood, Pete Eastman and Cobus van Bosch. No Logo devotees may lament the neat dovetailing of the desire theme and the current ad campaign of not-quite-edgy clothing chain YDE, but plenty of them will go anyway and most will concede that Softserve is about work that is punchy and accessible enough to succeed in this hipster vortex.
A theme like desire is an invitation to participants to produce work about sex — and sexy work — but it’s broad enough to serve as a rationale for just about anything, from Tracy Lee Lynch’s A Portrait of a Woman Exposing Her Genitals to Tom Schwarer’s vast, lucent moon. As always at Softserve there will a substantial acreage of mediocre work, and quantities of fun, throwaway stuff. This all contributes to the general air of carnival, but it may be worth forging past some of it to find Brundrit and Kreutzfeldt’s video ode to girls in uniform, and Julia Clark’s I’ve Waited Hours for This, which involves “gorgeous boys” and a skateboard half-pipe. Kevin Brand also opts for performance in the courtship piece I Could Make Your Life So Wonderful.It’s definitely worth finding the tendentiously named Torture Chamber, where Inge Prins will be showing her stop-motion film Drie Kaalkoppe Eet Tesame, which is based on a Jan Rabie short story about cannibalism. Also underground, Mark O’Donovan’s Odd Enjinears will be practising their entertaining brand of mad science in the Donker Gat, an atmospheric space below the old officers’ mess. Expect something catastrophically noisy involving glass, wire, shower curtains and acrobatics. That should be sound preparation for the sublime racket of Japanese noise artist Wa. Her piece Fifteen Minutes of Fame consists of domestic sounds sampled, distorted and amplified to shattering effect. She will perform it on the experimental dance floor at 1am, and after that Krushed & Sorted will probably sound like Westlife. They round off a DJ bill that features Warrick Sony, David West and Ready D.
Despite the spatial investigations of shows like Scurvy and Faultlines, the castle’s history and its array of spaces — the serene long gallery and spacious quad, the claustrophobic stairwells and cellars — ensure that it remains rich with possibilities for site-specific art. What is more, this architectural landscape will enable party-goers to undertake a varied path through the building, and the play of exposure and shelter, confinement and release should perform as effectively as any of the work, the itinerary of desire. Concerns about the erosion of unbranded space notwithstanding, it does seem clear that higher levels of sponsor support have enabled curators James Webb and Kim Stern to turn Softserve into the biggest night on the Cape Town art calendar. Both have been working full-time since October, and Webb stresses that improved support for participants will enable Iziko Museums to stock up on work by young artists at minimal expense. The involvement of a media partner like Good Hope FM should also shift the audience demographic, hitherto very City Bowl, in the direction of the Cape Flats.
YDEsire takes place at Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope on February 22 from 6pm. Tickets are R50 from Computicket or R60 at the door.