Towards the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, after the Greasers beat their rivals the Socs in a huge rain-soaked rumble, the dying Johnny whispers the now immortal line, “Stay gold, Ponyboy.” One of a plethora of ‘60s films made in the 1980s, the movie would seem to prove the old adage that nostalgia comes in 20-year increments. Indeed, the ‘60s have proven particularly fruitful as a source of inspiration to those who wish to claim it as the Last Good Time in America, leaving the decade in the vexed position of being both a lost Arcadia, and responsible for having set in motion the innumerable social and structural ills of the Great American Decline. Much like in the far better Coppola film, The Godfather, patrimony is about the only thing that the characters in The Outsiders have to hold onto, and its collapse is both inevitable and devastating.

The works in Stay Gold have varied relationships to the genre known as portraiture. If the portrait form most traditionally served as an avatar of the sovereign broadcast to a bounded constituency, the socio-cultural fissures of modernity and its aftermath have made relations between self and other among the primary concerns of representation. The emergence of adolescence as a cultural trope in the immediate postwar period coincides with a shift towards a more distributed model of power, one that leverages alienation and abstraction to carve out a winner-takes-all space apart from social accountability. “Stay gold, Ponyboy” speaks precisely to the failure to reconcile the trajectory of the individual with the integrity of a now ungraspable social body. As a tale of delinquent adolescent masculinity in a world without fathers, it is ironic that The Outsiders was written by a teenage girl, Susan Eloise Hinton, and published using the author’s first initials, rather than her given name, in order that she might be mistaken for a man.

Xinyi Cheng’s White Turtleneck, depicting a half-naked gay caucasian male, examines the fraught legacy of the muse, both reversing a colonial lens of domination and reinscribing new power dynamics onto its subject. Jutta Koether’s improvisatory work, from her “Fortune” series, posits a self capable of absorbing all others, refiguring identity as a succession of personae. Ellen Cantor, on the other hand, offers mediatized images of youth, beauty and stardom, reflecting on their crushing weight as ideological and psycho-social projections. A total collapse between self and other is imagined in Sam Lipp’s Objectivity, a painted depiction of an iPhone thirst trap pic; the transmissibility of this kind of image of the body is short-circuited here by the devotion implied in its meticulous material construction. Kyle Thurman’s three works on paper – one a self-portrait as Spiderman and Venom, another of a childhood friend now hockey player at a press conference, and the other an anonymous solder – are deeply empathic at the same time as their subjects appear wrenched from their surroundings, floating in abstract space. Finally, two silhouetted heads of a man and a woman in Lise Soskolne’s Untitled overlap, looking past one another offer in a deep fog of anxiety and alienation, suggesting a psychic failure inherent to the couple unit.

Through depictions of the self and other, the works in Stay Gold reflect on the exchanges inherent to the portrait form. As a means of articulating selfhood, and a mechanism for dominating others, to represent a subject is to frustrate a fantasy of control.

Text by Tim Gentles