Two Angles on Lynda Benglis’ Female Sensibility

December 16 2023

The following is written as a final assignment for the course 4.602 Modern Art and Mass Media at MIT.

Figure 1: Still from Female Sensibility, Linda Benglis, 1973

Controversial, underrated, and unapologetically bold – Lynda Benglis is a contemporary artist who never fails to surprise. Unlike most of her peers who aim to trademark a single material or style, she is known for using a diverse range of seemingly unrelated mediums, from wax paintings to Day-Glo latex floor pours to large frozen polyurethane sculpture drips to film and performance art (figure 2). Although her work indisputably builds on that of her predecessors, such as the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman or pop artist Andy Warhol, the provocative female sensuality and physicality of her work is uniquely her own. She embraces the vulgarity and plasticity of the hyper-commercialized American society while, at the same time, presenting a radically feminist perspective. However, her refusal to be conformed by any one movement or a male-dominated art world is also what led her to be isolated in infamous obscurity. Despite being only truly recognized in the late 2000s, Benglis is one of the most definitive contemporary artists of all time. 

Figure 2: Select works by Lynda Benglis

Amongst all of her works, her videos are perhaps the most interesting. One of her most noted works is Female Sensibility. Unlike most of her other video works (such as Now), which were heavily manipulated by editing, Female Sensibility is filmed in a comparatively more straightforward way, featuring a single shot of Benglis kissing, licking, and caressing a fellow artist, Marilyn Lenkowsky. However, make no mistake, these intimate displays are not that of grand Hollywood movies or tender arthouse films. At first glance, this thirteen-minute video is almost unintelligible — there seems to be no clear point or consequence. The visual tone of the video, including the two women's faces, is green and pasty, with their heavy foundations, blue and nude lipstick concealing all colors of redness and vitality of their faces, rendering their skin in a sickly ceramic quality that calls to mind Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1868 painting, Boy with Cat (figure 3). The spectator feels a tangible eeriness while watching the two women's hands and faces float on the screen, occasionally confronting the camera with their gaze. These imageries are coupled with a sort of white noise background composed of snippets of radio interviews, songs, and broadcasts collaged together, further adding to the disconcerting viewer experience. 

Figure 3: Boy with Cat, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1868

As elusive as Female Sensibility and Benglis' intentions are, there are writers and art critics whose writings can clarify certain aspects of the work. Anna Shechtman, a Klarman Fellow and assistant professor at Cornell University whose research specializes in media, literary, and film studies, in her 2020 essay "The Medium Concept," describes the rise of the medium as the means of categorizing and criticizing art and how the two words, "media" and "medium," exist in an inseparable determinant negation to each other. On the other hand, writing from a more contemporary view relative to Benglis, Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, filmmaker, and professor of film and media studies at the University of London, in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" borrows Sigmund Freud's lens of psychoanalysis to examine the American patriarchal society as it is reflected in film, particularly in narrative cinema. Although Shechtman and Mulvey write from apparently different perspectives, there are ultimately many core similarities between their commentaries on Benglis' Female Sensibility.

In "The Medium Concept," Shechtman follows the reasoning of prominent late twentieth art critic Clement Greenberg, whose best-known essays "Avant-garde and Kitsch" and "Modernist Painting" founded a covenant of a number of art critics and artists alike whose work turned Greenberg's theories into a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the fundamental cornerstones of the Greenbergian school of art criticism is its formalism. In "Avant-garde and Kitsch," Greenberg asserts, "For [the artist] the medium became, privately, professionally, the content of his art" (Greenberg 7). Because of its origins in Impressionism, modernism is historically the antithesis of French Romanticism and Academia art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Greenberg, who wanted to uphold modernism as the highest art form, needed a criterion inherent to any painting that was easily provable and visible to distinguish modern art from everything else. Medium was the perfect choice. While movements like Romanticism or Surrealism are "medium transparent," whose realism "used art to conceal art" (Shechtman 14), modernism is "medium opaque" in that it "used art to call attention to art" (Shechtman 14). These ideas justified medium purity, i.e., painting about painting, sculpture about sculpture, which, in Greenberg's terms, is the last wall of defense for avant-garde's elevated autonomy against the corruptions of the "commerce, politics, [and] therapy" of kitsch. Concisely, and in Shechtman's terms, Greenberg "[asserted] the medium concept as an ostensibly transhistorical means of conferring aesthetic legitimacy and political value to midcentury American art" (Shechtman 14). However, Greenberg's attempt to historicize medium is all but a hoax; as Shechtman cleverly pointed out, terms like "oil on canvas," which represents the pinnacle of medium purity, increased in usage not because of its "popularity… as a medium between 1960 and the present but of the medium as a new and important criterion for assessing art in light of the media concept" (Shechtman 8). Furthermore, Shechtman argued that mediums and media have never been discrete and that "mediums have always been media" (Shechtman 25). Even modern artists who emphasized their medium, like their French Academy colleagues, have never indeed been separate from the politics, patronage, and, in every sense of the word, media of their times. 

Film as a mixed media is the perfect counterexample of medium purity. While there is a physical host of film, such as the camera, microphone, and projector, there is no actual agreement on what the medium of film is. If Greenberg tried to draw a line in the sand between the avant-garde and kitsch, then Benglis was the unruly waves of sea water that washed these idealized classifications away. By working with the medium of film, Benglis provokes Greenberg's two major concerns: the first being that mixed media confuses the audience and prompts them to call into question what constitutes an artwork, and the second being that film's medium opacity and theatricality of film brings art too close to the worldly dust of kitsch. Visually, Female Sensibility is a highly performative piece that psychologically involves the audience in its art, whose immaterial medium of film creates "a spectatorial fantasy of wholly optical absorption" (Shechtman 19). Audibly, Benglis' incorporation of radio background noises is an explicit reference to mass media and popular culture, including an advertisement about a company that selects French wine, a broadcast about President Nixon's suggestion for a single six-year presidential term, an instruction about the story of creation from Christian mythology, a segment of the classic country song "Let's Build a World Together" by Tammy Wynette and George Jones, and a phone interview with a woman who is helping her friend with weight loss. There is no better representation of the buzz of modern American life than the incessant sounds of the radio, which, if played long enough, melts into a mindless gibberish that we involuntarily absorb but never consciously process. As the creator of this piece, Benglis activity chose these formal qualities to respond to and invalidate Greenberg's theory of modern art. In particular, despite Greenbergian critics' attempts, art has not only never been apart from life but also has always been deeply rooted in life. 

While Shechtman builds her argument from the medium concept in art criticism, Mulvey takes a different approach to addressing the films of her time from a feminist stance. She establishes her argument by describing a patriarchal society using Freud's ideas and methods, appropriating psychoanalysis as a political weapon for the feminist movement. Freud's idea of "anatomy is destiny" justifies the function of women in a patriarchal unconscious as the coexistence of the "memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack" (Mulvey 2). This, in short, means that women exist only in relation to men, that they are only the "bearer[s] of meaning, not maker[s] of meaning" (Mulvey 2-3). Mulvey observes that this "socially established interpretation of sexual difference" (Mulvey 1) is, often subconsciously, embedded in film as a reflection of society and its internal structures and authority as a whole. While film remains within a mainstream patriarchal construct (as it has for much of the twentieth century) with the assumption that the subject is male, the woman will continue to serve only as an "erotic object" (Mulvey 11) for the characters within the dimension of the screen and the spectators watching in the theatre. As the male character can never be the object of sexual desire, he is the image of a more perfect ego, which Mulvey describes allows the spectator to indirectly own the female character through identification and participation. These conditions opened for change, however, when the technological advances in film allowed for the rise of alternate cinema. This new form of film, Mulvey claims, is not to denounce mainstream film moralistically but rather to move away from illusionistic narratives and the singular look of characters within the screen to provide the audience an awareness of their role as spectators and to look away from the male gaze and consequently towards another social order.

Figure 4: Untitled, 2018, Kerry James Marshall

Benglis partakes in direct conversation with the patriarchal American society and Hollywood films by responding to and acting against its conventional characteristics. In her essay, Mulvey points out that "the magic of the Hollywood style at its best … [is] its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure" (Mulvey 4). However, there is almost no sense of pleasure or enjoyment that can be derived from watching Benglis and Lenkowsky in Female Sensibility despite their sexual interactions. Instead of satiating the spectator and indulging their scopophilia, Benglis makes them feel uncomfortable and predatory, like the guilt of peeping through a neighbor's window as they undress, as depicted in Untitled (2018) by artist Kerry James Marshall (figure 4). Furthermore, Benglis responds directly to the idea of an exclusively male gaze by removing the male character from her video altogether. Suddenly, the source of narcissistic identification for the audience is gone, leaving only the woman as both the subject and the object of desire. As the video continues, the relatively unchanging visuals force us to notice the radio segments in the background, whose content, narrated exclusively by men, represents a form of saturated masculinity. In detail, several instances explicitly point to Freudian psychology. In a duetted country song, "Let's Build a World Together," there is a part where the female singer asks, "Well, how much do you want me?" to which the male singer replies, "Well, I want you as much as a child wants its mother." This lyric alludes to the Oedipus complex in Freudian theory but, more importantly, to how women's inability to transcend the wife-mother image forms the patriarchal unconscious. Another instance, featuring a brief preaching about the creation story in Christianity, alludes to the role of women, such as the virgin Mary or Eve in Christian mythology, who are worshipped not as individuals but for their relationship to their sons and husbands. It also references the structure of Christianity as a social organization, which is overwhelmingly headed by men and patriarchal values. By ignoring the background sounds, the two women symbolically disregard the male-dominated society by exploring lesbianism as a radical phase of feminism. Benglis disrupts the dichotomy of men being "active/looking" and women being "passive/looked-at" (Mulvey 21) and creates a complex interaction of looks.

Broadly, Shechtman and Mulvey's arguments, as they are applied to Benglis' Female Sensibility, find commonality on two platforms: film and feminism. Both the medium of film and the conversation between feminist theory are evident formal qualities within Benglis' work that seek not only to overturn a male-dominated art world but also to topple the internal authority within the elite realm of art criticism. By incorporating stimuli for senses beyond the optical, mixed media opened the door for female artists to actively participate in the art world, not as the objects of male desire but as the subject, expanding the art world's boundaries beyond a limited circle of men. Benglis' intentions are also clearly expressed in the title of her work. Sensibility, defined as the sensitivity to complex emotional and aesthetic stimuli, inherently implies an active ability to experience for oneself from one's own perspective. "Female sensibility" is then the antonym of the male gaze, asserting that women are not only individuals independent from men but also autonomous artists who themselves function as the subject of their art.

Works Cited

Bueti, Federica. "Lynda Benglis by Federica Bueti." BOMB, 15 Dec. 2016.

"Female Sensibility." Smithsonian American Art Museum, americanart.si.edu/artwork/female-sensibility-76572. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Kampmann, Elisabeth. "Greenberg, Clement: Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Kindlers Literatur Lexikon (KLL), 2020, pp. 1-2.

"Lynda Benglis in "Boundaries" Preview." art21, 15 Feb. 2012.

"Lynda Benglis | Embryo II." The Museum of Modern Art, New York City | MoMA, www.moma.org/collection/works/105739. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

"Lynda Benglis." Locks Gallery, www.locksgallery.com/artists/lynda-benglis/series/fountains. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminisms, 1975, pp. 438-448.

Shechtman, Anna. "The Medium Concept." Representations, vol. 150, no. 1, 2020, pp. 61-90, doi:10.1525/rep.2020.150.1.61.

"Untitled - Kerry James Marshall | The Broad." The Broad, www.thebroad.org/art/kerry-james-marshall/untitled-0. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.