Female Sensibility, 1973
Video, colour, with sound, 14′
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2002
Lynda Benglis’s video Female Sensibility is typical of a broader exploration of the body, desire, and representation, in which relationship dynamics and intimacy play a central role. In the video Benglis presents two women in close-up as they touch, kiss, and caress one another in front of the camera. The intimacy of the scene is undermined by an intrusive sonic backdrop: fragments
from American radio shows, male voices, jokes, and songs that reproduce stereotypical perceptions of gender, success, and everyday life. Somewhere between awareness of and indifference to the camera, the two women create an intimate, sensual space that seems detached from the surrounding world, while serving as a counterpoint to the masculine positions and industrial rationalism of works such as those by Tsoclis, Kounellis, and Calzolari exhibited opposite. Intensely physical, hedonistic, and overtly sexual, Benglis’s work is a feminist twist on the act of looking, turning it into a field of tension and raising questions about who is looking and who is being observed, as well as how these roles may be overturned.
Filmed in the early 1970s, Female Sensibility engages directly with feminist discourse about the politics of the gaze. At a time when cinema and the media were understood to be organised around the male gaze, Benglis uses video to subvert or destabilise this relationship. The two women—the artist herself and the artist Marilyn Lenkowsky—are not presented merely as objects of viewing, but as subjects who actively negotiate their presence before the camera. The scene is ambiguous: is this a private moment or a deliberate performance? Their gestures are tender yet slightly ritualistic, as if they were experimenting with different ways of being within the frame. At the same time, the soundscape —filled with male voices, radio commentary, and everyday chatter—serves as a reminder of the broader cultural context within which the work is situated. Amid this tension between image and sound, the intimacy between the two women takes on a political dimension. The work thus becomes an early and decisive contribution to feminist video art, exploring how desire, representation, and spectatorship are intertwined within the image’s very experience.
Lynda Benglis was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1941. She lives and works in New York.
