The Telltale Gesture

To Bill King, a person's gesture is as revealing as his signature. The knowing arch of an eyebrow, the way a woman touches her hair, that awkward fumbling for a cigarette at a cocktail party--all tell much about a person's view of himself, his pretensions and anxieties. Walking into a room of King's sculptures, a visitor is likely to feel he has met them all some place before. And he probably has. Here is a Madison Avenue type in J. Press suit, there a teen-ager in toreadors, over there a gangly businessman on holiday, all legs and knobby knees in Bermuda shorts.

In observing a gait or a glance, and the very cut of contemporary clothes, King has turned gesture into a devastating commentary on modern mores. His sly and practiced eye is supported by a pair of incredibly deft hands that have mastered carving (wood), welding (metals), modeling (plaster), and stitching (burlap and linen). Last week an exhibition slated to travel to eight U.S. cities opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art, showing King's mastery of still another medium--sheet aluminum. Each work consists of two to five sections that had been cut out paper-doll fashion, and notched together as simply as, well, a paper doll.

Droll Humor. A lanky 6 ft. 1 in., William King at 45 looks like one of his own sculptures. Born in Florida, he took up engineering, soon became bored and headed for New York. He enrolled at Cooper Union and, three years later, won a Fulbright scholarship to study sculpture in Italy. His earliest works were wood carvings of bathers, musicians and athletes, which owed much to American folk art.

Even then his droll humor was evident. In 1964, while using burlap to impress the texture of cloth in his lost-wax bronzes, he hit upon the idea of making sculptures out of the burlap itself draped over metal armatures. He quickly became handy with a needle and thread, still chuckles over the fact that when thieves recently broke into his studio, they walked off with his old secondhand Singer sewing machine and ignored his sculptures (which command up to $7,500).

Ridiculously Real. Fabric added a new depth of characterization to his art, making the figures seem more real and all the more ridiculous. There followed works in linen and shiny vinyl, a material that marvelously captured the slick airs and plastic emptiness of city sophistication. The aluminum sculptures reflect a more tender view of human nature. Several celebrate the joys of parenthood. Women, too, appear in a more sensuous and loving light.

Still, as in all good humorists, there has often been an implied anguish, a faint twinge of bitterness behind the witty satire. King's most recent work, titled Farmers and currently displayed at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Manhattan, is not comic at all, but starkly tragic. It consists of a dozen or so limp, lifeless figures fashioned from corrugated cardboard. King ran up a pair of black cotton pajamas for each, made conical hats from brown wrapping paper, and tossed them all in a casual heap on the floor. "I wanted to make a point about Viet Nam," he says, "and this was something I could do in my own medium."

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