“Lock up a department store today, open the door after a hundred years and you will have a Museum of Modern Art,” Andy Warhol said in 1985. I imagine the year 2985: In search of culture, a band of cyborgs breaks out the revolving doors of some abandoned Bloomingdale’s and roams the sales floor, their flashlight beams falling bluely on strange inventory that, in all its courtly, hard-edged majesty, looks a little like the sculptures of Diane Simpson.
The Academy of Arts and Letters is not a dystopian Bloomingdale’s but an uptown Beaux Arts jewel box off the 1 train where Simpson, aged ninety, is having her first institutional solo show in New York (on view through February 8). For four decades, this art-world ronin has transformed details of architecture and apparel—a peplum, an art deco window display, an Elizabethan bodice, a piece of samurai armor—into otherworldly structures hewn from humble materials like cardboard, MDF, and linoleum. These forms are rendered in skewed axonometric perspective, as are the meticulous hand-drawn blueprints they’re based on (marvels of Simpson’s disegno occupy a downstairs gallery). The drawings leak her own industry secrets but only augment the works’ mystery. The sculptures shimmer between plane and volume in a kind of dimensional dishabille, plotting ornament’s revenge upon Minimalism.
Simpson’s objects traffic in an erotics of control and containment, calling to mind such disparate fellow Chicagoans as the Imagist Christina Ramberg and the couturier Charles James. Underskirt (1986) translates a lady’s pannier into a green, asymmetrical ziggurat lattice swaddled in cotton mesh. Formal Wear (1998), which gives the show its title, suspends from the ceiling two black, furisode-like sleeves of spunbonded polyester, in fact inspired by a pair of opulent cuffs in a Lucas Cranach painting of circa 1530. Elsewhere there’s an Adirondack chair you can’t sit on, an Amish bonnet you can’t wear, and a portico that offers no shelter. In such beautiful, painstakingly useless things there is a useful lesson for artists, which is that there is no falser grail than absolute freedom; look instead for the perfect set of constraints.