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(a) The Journal of Culture and the Unconscious, Berkeley, Vol. VI, 1, 2006, pp. 62-78.

donald judd: the cathexis of space

timothy martin
DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY, LEICESTER UK

SPECIFIC OBJECTS AND INTEREST

I
n 1962 the artist and art critic Donald Judd (1928-
1994) gave up painting for three dimensional
work. In his seminal 1965 essay “Specific Objects”
he stated his position saying, “Three dimensions are
real space. That, moreover, automatically gets rid of
the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space
in and around marks and colors-which is riddance of
one of the salient and most objectionable relics of
European art… A work can be as powerful as it can
be thought to be. Actual space is intrinsically more
powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.”
Judd concluded the essay with a remark that rang in
the ears of many artists and critics, “A work needs
only to be interesting.”1
 Judd's essay announced many of the changes that were to mark the shift from Abstract
Expressionism to Minimalism. It rejected the painterly depiction of objects in illusory space, and the
tension or disjunction between flatness and depth that had dominated Ab Ex. Instead it announced a
new cachet and a new disjunction between 'real space' and 'real objects' situated it. But, what caused
the greater interest was space; it held the affective power, and Judd came out strongly in advocating
those artists that were trying to think through ways of moving into it. The artists mentioned by Judd
were praised, even where much remained to do. None of the thinking in the new work had yet real-
ly hit upon the full affective power of space; but they were getting there. As will shortly be seen, Judd
theorised his interest in space starting with a theory of the causes of interest per se, and he did so by
positing the subject in a rather animal, pre-oedipal, pre-symbolic 'natural' state. As such he set the
question of space into a particular problematic, a subjectivity that arose not out of a psychical sub-
stance, but out of an animal substance. While there has been some critical analysis of Judd's prefer-
ences for empiricism, there has been somewhat less made of his preference for physiological psy-
chology, the way he applied it, the limits he encountered, and the conundrums and paradoxes it
raised in his work and his writing. Judd started off with an acute sense of a disjunction between the
direct but indistinct emotional hold that space had on him, and the precise thinking that went into the
objects he made. His attempt to make sense of this disjunction started with his reading of a theory of
interest derived from physiological psychology. I would like to start with an examination of this the-
oretical position and then proceed to a more psychoanalytic position in considering Judd's pleasure
in space and its disjunction with his thinking about objects. This will firstly entail following Judd's
own development, and then moving to a more complete construction that considers some of the
implications of pleasure in space.
PHYSIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF INTEREST:

PERRY, FREUD AND JUDD

Judd credited his initial concept of “interest” to the writings of Ralph Barton Perry, a professor of psy-
chology at Harvard from 1913 to 1953. Perry's General Theory of Value: Its Meaning and Basic
Principles Construed in Terms of Interest (1920) sought to discover the objective principles of criti-
cism and made a claim that was meant to be as true of animals as it was of man, that the value of an
object lies in its relation to the interest taken in it.2 Perry found that interest was spontaneous and auto-
matic, and quite different from considered acts of rational judgement. As Perry said, “the interest that
creates the value is always other than the judgement that recognizes it.”3 In separating interest from
judgment Perry provided Judd with a basis on which to write art criticism that was different from many
of his immediate predecessors. Instead of making rapid judgments about the formal quality and orig-
inality of a work of art, as did Clement Greenberg, Judd first attended to the sheer power of visual
interest in the object. This was a power that came arguably both from the object's qualities and from
the spectator, but not initially from the part of the spectator that was concerned with conscious acts
of aesthetic judgement. In Judd's criticism even a degraded or clichéd use of a form could receive
approval, provided it provoked his interest.4
In the larger context of 60s art criticism a concept of interest was a rather new way to use psy-
chology to surmount the growing philosophical objections surrounding the art criticism of his prede-
cessors. Greenberg based his critical philosophy on Kant's concept of a rational disinterestedness that

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guaranteed objective judgement of 'good’ and ‘bad' art.5 A critical concept of interest, on the other hand,
need make no claim on rationality because its values are a matter of instincts, and instincts can be observed
in terms of physiological reactions. If this 'animal' concept of interest managed to avoid many of the prob-
lems that beset critical claims to rational disinterestedness, it nevertheless ran into its own problems in try-
ing to define instincts. In animals interest arose from instincts. But, as Perry found following William James,
human interest arose from an “other” part of the mind, a more complex “motor-affective life; that is to say,
with instinct, desire, feeling, will and all their family of states, acts and attitudes.”6
Perry may initially sound like a typical early modern behaviourist. In his naturalist's taxonomy of
“modes of interest and their objects,” for example, he suggests a number of definitions of interest based on
studies of animal behaviour, such as ‘governing propensity.’ ‘instinct for self-preservation,’ ‘attitude’ and
‘anticipatory adjustment.’ Perry's conclusion, that interest is ’an anticipation of an unfulfilled propensity,’
was based on a concept of a build up of quantifiable mental energy. One of the authorities Perry cited in
formulating his theory of quantifiable mental energy was the German neurologist Sigmund Freud.
Nearly thirty years before Perry, Freud introduced one of his most enduring and fundamental con-
cepts, that of cathexis, in the hope of discovering the neurophysiological basis on which the mental appa-
ratus took an active interest in objects in the external world.7 In his 1894 study of extreme states of posi-
tive (obsession) and negative (phobia) interest in objects Freud hypothesised that, “in mental functions
something is to be distinguished–a quota of affect or sum of excitation–which possesses all the character-
istics of a quantity (although we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution,
displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an elec-
tric charge is spread over the surface of a body.”8 In this theory, pathological interest was due to an exces-
sive quantity of cathexis, or psychical electro-chemical energy displaced or discharged onto a physical
object.
The highly physiological basis of Freud's theory of cathexis at this time may have contributed to
Perry's qualified approval of Freud's further theory of the “complex,” that an individual's interests are part-
ly ontogenic–determined by childhood dispositions, the memories of which are not available to the part
of the adult mind that makes value judgements because they have been forgotten or repressed. Only the
affect of the cathexis remains available.
JUDD AND INTEREST

Judd's early career as an art critic is noticeably influenced by Perry's concept of interest, an influence that
he openly, if belatedly, credited. He sought to observe objects by making empirical and formal descrip-
tions of them, but often delayed judgements about 'good and bad' in order to test whether the formal prop-
erties of the object provoked his interest. Most typically, if the object had strong whole forms in real space
his interest was high. This left open, however, some of the same problems faced by Perry and Freud. What
caused interest and why did some formal properties cause interest while others did not? When Judd came
to write his defence of the new work that he championed, “Specific Objects,” his solution was to quote
John Locke, "The motive to change is always some uneasiness. Nothing setting us upon the change of state,
or upon any new action, but some uneasiness.”9 The text by Locke that Judd quotes continues on, saying,
“This uneasiness we may call, as it is, desire; which is an un-easiness of the mind for the want of some absent
good.”10 On first impression Judd locates the cause of interest using the physiological language and con-
cepts of instincts derived from Perry's initial conclusion that interest is an anticipation of an unfulfilled
propensity. Yet, neither Judd nor Perry are quite so simple. If other essays by Judd are examined it would
seem that he deeply appreciated many of the conundrums and paradoxes raised by Perry and that he was

MARTIN • 65
repeatedly able to use a range of Freudian concepts in theorising these problems. As will be seen, how-
ever, Judd reaches a limit particularly in discussing his own interests. To explore these limits I will
extend the application of Freudian concepts beyond Judd's range, making a relatively small theoreti-
cal step even if a larger leap, say to Lacan or Klein for example, might also serve. This step will never-
theless go quite far into testing what Perry sanctioned in his General Theory, that there is value in enter-
taining the possibility that interests have an ontogenic aspect. It is by way of an understanding of the
ontogenic aspect of Judd's interest that it may then be possible to say something about Judd's larger
contribution to spatial representational systems. Ultimately, as Briony Fer has put it in relation to Judd,
“It is a symbolic that concerns us, not individual properties that carry individual meanings as ‘sym-
bols’.”11
ORIFICES AND INTEREST

Judd began writing art criticism in 1959 at a point when his work as a painter was faltering. In 1962,
just at the time that he was constructing his first specific objects, Judd wrote some of his most accom-
plished and approving criticism of work that, surprisingly perhaps, bore no immediate visual similari-
ty to his own. Notable among these is his review of the work of Lee Bontecou. Her relief sculptures of
“orificial holes,” were praised for a singularity gained through a “polarization of elements and quali-
ties.” Judd found himself captivated by the “menacing” power of these orifices, not because they
opened into voids–he clearly states they do not–but because they are “seemingly capable of firing or
swallowing. The image extends from something as social as war to something as private as sex.” Judd
was particularly interested in the reliefs that had two or more orifices, adding that “The work has a
primitive, oppressive and unmitigated individuality.”12 Set in his dry, spartan, descriptive prose it was
a curiously intimate claim.
Judd's essay on Bontecou has its critical limitations, but his enthusiasm for a sculpture of orifices
is not so surprising if taken back to Perry and his discussion of Freud's 1910 “Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality,” an essay in which orifices are given as the physiological cause of instincts and
the objects of childhood autoerotic libidinal excitation, par excellence.13 The orifice is the part of the
body that, for Judd, has both the power to “swallow and fire,” but these comments need to be unpicked
carefully. Firstly they rephrase Perry's dual metaphor for the cause of interest.14 Bontecou's sculptures
of orifices posed an inherent “magnetic” power to attract interest, but so too did the spectator or critic
have the “archer's” power to shoot an interest through the orifice of the eye. Perry, and Judd in his
stead, enjoyed this ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum set by the behaviourists whether interest was caused
by the spectator's desire or by the object of desire. Secondly, Judd's solution is, theoretically, quite sym-
pathetic to Freud's “Three Essays” in its demonstration of the enigma of the erotic sexualisation of ori-
fices. Freud observes that in childhood an orifice (oral, anal or genital) has the singular power to pro-
ject the sensation of its own stimulation until it finally attracts external stimulation and produces a feel-
ing of satisfaction.15 In the course of attending to the materials and construction of Bontecou's sculp-
tures, Judd cannot resist inserting his sculptor's finger into the orifice and enacting this conundrum of
sexualisation. He remarks that it is not a void; the orifice is “exceptionally single” but based on a “polar-
isation of elements”. The orifice itches singularly and throbs uneasily for attention until it finally finds
its finger, its polar pair to complete the sexualisation. At this moment the orifice is transformed from its
biological function into a site of desire.

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 Although many critics, both then and now, are hesitant to credit Judd with any knowledge of psycho-
analysis, he seems in 1962 to quite easily negotiate Freud's initial solution to the physiological problem of
the cause of libidinal cathectic interest. It lies in the body and its orifices, and it is their uneasiness that caus-
es the emergence of a polar complement. Orifices in this sense do their own thinking, and Judd's essay is
such an exemplary piece of understated intimacy in its consideration of the transformation of interest into
desire that it is worth enquiring what he was up to in the studio.
In 1962, just at the time he wrote on Bontecou, Judd was in the process of substantial change, reject-
ing painting to make the first of his specific objects, Untitled, 1962 [DSS 33].16 This sculpture launched, as
he later put it, a lifetime's worth of work, and it bears a careful analysis. If, as I have suggested, Judd was
deeply invested in Perry's concept of interest and that he understood Freud's theory that the seat of desire
lay in the somatic orifices, then it might be excusable to ask, what would this work be if considered as Judd's
'essay' on desire?
DSS33 began with a pipe bent twice to a total of ninety degrees, which he found in the street, and paint-
ed black. With the help of his father, whose hobby was wood working, he attached the pipe to two wood-
en boards painted in a vivid cadmium red light. The pipe determines the width of the boards, as it is posi-
tioned in the middle, and it passes through their thickness.
In the light of Perry's writings, it starts with his act of inter-
est in the pipe found in the street, a seemingly random
found-object that attracted his attention. Judd was, of
course, fully aware of Dada and Surrealist methods and
their recent revival in New York, for example in the work
of Jasper Johns. Taken as an essay in desire, the red boards
were then added as a way of revisiting the moment and
actions of interest. Enervated with color, the flat wood sur-
face physically folds away from the wall to the pipe. In this
initial Perry-esque reading, DSS 33 is a representation of a
“motor affective response” to an object of desire.17
If, as Judd later claimed, DSS 33 launched the whole
of his mature oeuvre, then it is also worth considering in
the light of his comments on Bontecou. The pipe is not
attached to the surface of the boards, but passes through
to expose the pipe ends on the 'back' sides. A hypotheti-
cal flat version of this work, with a common 'U' bend
pipe, would have left both ends of the pipe invisible. As
Judd relates the story, the work was initially hung on the
wall as a relief sculpture, flat on one surface. This would
have shown only one pipe end. He then placed it, free
standing, in the space of the floor, to allow both pipe
ends to be visible on the 'back' sides of the work. In this DSS 33 Judd Art  Judd Foundation Licensed by VAGA, NYC 2007
respect one benefit of getting out into real space and away from the illusory space of painting was that it
allowed the two rims of his pipe to be fully seen. On the frontal side of the work there may be an essay
worthy of Perry and, on the back, an essay comparable to his writing on Bontecou's orifices.

MARTIN • 67
 Read in these terms, DSS 33 looks like a physiological psychology essay on interest. In a way
that is compatible with Perry's theory of interest and Freud's early theory of cathexis, it references
physical acts, quantifiable energies, tangible objects and locates the cause of interest in orificial dri-
ves, firing off their desires and swallowing or capturing their objects. But, as Freud is quick to point
out, interest discharges more than motor neurons and adrenaline, it discharges a memory and a
thought.18 The biographical evidence, limited as it is, suggests that DSS 33 came at a time when an
active but thwarted bachelor sexuality, gave way to a new thought about erotic desires and objects.
Two of the most remarkable essays by Judd that consider interest and the instinctual erotic dri-
ves are his second essay on Lee Bontecou of 1965 and the last essay Judd wrote while waiting to die,
“Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular” (2005).
“Lee Bontecou” (1965) is something of a rerun of his original article, which helps point out the devel-
opments in the intervening three years. Written less than a year after marrying the dancer Julia Finch,
his theorisation of the drives seems to have taken account of Freudian theory written after the 1910
essay on infantile sexuality. Much in the process of propagating his first chil, there is now no
oral-anal-genital ambiguity about the orifice of interest. Of Bontecou's work he says straight out that,
“This redoubt is a mons veneris. ‘The warhead will be mated at the firing position.’ The image also
extends from bellicosity, both martial and psychological-aspects which do not equate–to invitation,
erotic and psychological, and deathly as well.”19 It is clearer in the second essay, in other words,
that Judd was quite able to theorise the instincts in terms of Freud's thesis of the drives of Eros and
Thanatos as devel-oped in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and to emphasise genital orifices as the
primary object of interest.
In both essays on Bontecou, Judd commends the work for its primitive instinctual power, but by
his second essay he expands upon this power of the orifices as a product of its three dimensionali-
ty. Painting and drawing, even when large in scale, only represented space; they were “allusive” of
space. Of Bontecou's reliefs he says, “Rather than inducing idealisation and generalisation and being
allusive, it excludes. The work asserts its own existence, form and power. It becomes an object in
its own right…. The black hole does not allude to a black hole; it is one.”20 The erotic and menac-
ing power of the hole was a product of its presence in three dimensions, like “a beached mine or a
well hidden in the grass.” In a sense these comments may seem rather obvious references to an
active heterosexual awareness of the cause and discharge of desire, the humour of a man still in hon-
eymoon mood. Of course encountering a mine on a beach a mount of Venus or a well hidden in
the grass is more interest-causing than a painting of the same. But, Judd's own work did not make
use of such referential images. It was much more abstract and, in “Specific Objects,” written within
months, Judd again insisted that it was the combination of object and three dimensional space that
was the balm to his uneasiness and his desire. It raises the question whether, following the mor-
phology of an orifice, Judd's interest was in space as much as in an object. More than thirty years
later, in what was knowingly his last essay, he described DSS 33 largely in these terms.
The size of the right angle is determined by the right angle of a black pipe, whose two open
ends are the centres of the outer planes of the right angle, which is painted cadmium red
light; red and black, and black as space. The right angle doesn't stand or sit and although it
is vertical, 122 centimetres high, there is no way to believe it to be an abstracted figure, or
an abstracted object. All sides are equal. There is scarcely an inside and an outside, only
the space within the angle and the space beyond the angle. The only enclosed space is

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 inside the pipe. This slight linear space determines the dimensions of the broad planes. The shell
of this narrow space passes through the breadth of the inner angle, a definite space through a gen-
eral space.21
This description from “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular” suggests that
DSS 33 was made out of an interest in the three kinds of space that it created. What is to be made of this?
It firstly suggests that any attempt to read it just as an essay in motor affective interest in an object is woe-
fully incomplete. Judd says that the work was not an abstracted figure, in the sense of a totem, an asym-
metric gesturing body as in the work of Di Suvero, but a demarcation of a definite or specific space with-
in the angle, a general external space around the work, and a narrow space that, in passing through the
specific space, determines the whole. Given the double entendre remark in the essay, this clearly gave
him substantial pleasure, “I was puzzled by them, especially the first [DSS 33], the relief that isn't a relief.
I had made what I wanted.”22 Before trying to make some sense of Judd's remarks it would first be help-
ful to ask what he made of his interest in space. In “Red and Black” he comments,
There has been almost no discussion of space in art, nor in the present. The most important and
developed aspect of present art is unknown. This concern, my main concern, has no history.
There is no context; there are no terms; there are not any theories. There is only the visible work
invisible. Space is made by an artist or architect; it is not found and packaged. It is made by
thought.23
This remark seems to substantiate the view that Judd had a cathectic interest in space but also a frustra-
tion over a lack of consciousness of space in art criticism, in psychology, and even in his own early work.
According to Judd on his deathbed, in the 60s he was not particularly conscious of its satisfactions. The
best he could say in Specific Objects was, “The use of three dimensions isn't the use of a given form.
There hasn't been enough time and work to see limits. So far, considered most widely, three dimensions
are mostly a space to move into.”24 In his last essay he was able to say that space was “made by thought”
and that its pursuit was worthy of art historical immortality.
In the context of 1960s American art criticism three dimensional space did sometimes receive rather
short shrift. Michael Fried bore this out as much as most critics, saying of Judd's essay on “Specific
Objects” that “literal” space did not properly belong to fine art; it belonged to theatre and to everyday
life, reflecting, perhaps, the Kantian view that space was a transcendental, an a priori precondition to
rational thought.24 Although Judd is somewhat rhetorical in his despair over the lack of interest in space
(he goes on to mention half a dozen historical theories), Judd's general point stands up if Perry is to be
consulted. Not only was Kantian aesthetics stumped by real space, Perry's theory of interest was also
caught by the problem of interest in things that are “invisible” and “made by thought,” especially when
instincts are involved. Perry was so aware of this conundrum that he abandoned all hope of making a
purely positivist and empiricist account of interest.
Perry, Freud, and in a sense Judd too, started out in the hope of an empirical and scientific theory of
interest. Yet each in their way encountered the same problem, one which might first be given to Perry to
describe. Citing the examples of immortality and universal peace, he runs into the difficulty that man
takes an interest in entities that are “ideal” in the sense that they do not exist. “While peace and immor-
tality may be non-existent or questionable, the aspiration and the longing are facts…. For longing and
aspiration have objects, and specific longings or aspirations have their specific objects.” Perry's language
is curiously suggestive of Judd's in addressing the problem that the mind was able to take an interest in
objects that were not facts of perception, but objects that it imagined and projected. Perry found it nec-
essary to enter into and to summarise a whole range of metaphysical philosophy because the problem
MARTIN • 69
could not be resolved without positing “some supplementary category of being” that could project
and value objects that were invisible and made by thought.
Philosophical and psychological speculation on a “supplementary category of being” is, of
course, an enormous topic and one outside the range of this enquiry. What I propose as a way of pro-
ceeding is that Judd's interest in space may be addressed for its contribution to an understanding of
spatial representational systems by taking his implicit psychological theory one step further. The first
step starts with Perry's conundrum and the need to posit a category of being in addition to a con-
scious, reality testing mental entity (ego) and an instinctual mental entity (id). Perry found that these
two categories, despite their completely contrary natures, became mixed or blended in acts that bore
the imprint of both. This was no more apparent than in an artist's creation, valuation and apprecia-
tion of a work of art.25
As I have so far tried to indicate, there is in Judd's work a clear line of physiological and psy-
chological thinking about interest and cathexis. Yet, despite being seemingly aware of Freud's work
up to and including Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Judd did not avail himself of the theoretical solu-
tion to his interest in space that can be found in Freud's Ego and the Id. This may be due to his scep-
ticism of psychoanalysis even if he used it, or to the fact that some of Perry's writings predate it, and
partly because Freud's solution does not at first glance amend itself to the problem. In what remains
of this essay I would like to pursue Judd's problem beyond Judd's limits by making a series of analy-
ses using Freud's The Ego and the Id. In order to do so it would first be helpful to review Freud's last
major attempt to theorise cathexis.
CATHEXIS: IDEAL EGO AND OBJECT

Within three years of Perry's first edition of “General Theory,” Freud too was prompted to consider a
similar paradox, first raised in his essay on Leonardo Da Vinci. The foundation of depth psychology
had long been based on the concept of a conscious ego under the influence of the perceptual system
and an unconscious consisting of repressed instinctual cathexes that originated in the id. For example,
in the Oedipus complex, the id cathected libidinously with certain objects such as the mother and, as
access to these objects became impossible or inappropriate, they were repressed by the ego, and
forced into the unconscious where they could fester into neurosis. In the course of writing Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, however, Freud realised that his theory of ego and id foundered because there
seemed to be substantial unconscious content that was not the product of the ego's repression of the
id. In The Ego and the Id he proposed a solution to his observation that there were thought processes
and creative processes that drew on the same psychical energy as the instincts and could take place
outside of conscious awareness. His solution to the need for a “supplementary category of being” was
to propose an “ideal ego” that could think, attract and direct cathexis. This ideal ego, though it took
energy from the instincts could, in concert with the unconscious, create its own objects. Much as Perry
had found, there was a perceptual consciousness that could assess matters of fact and reality, and
instincts that valued certain objects. But, there was also a part of the mind that was ideal and could
communicate with unconscious impulses and this, at least in part, “solves the puzzle of how it is that
the ideal itself can to a great extent remain unconscious and inaccessible to the ego.”26
Freud's hypothesis of an ideal ego was based on the observation that narcissists take a sexual sat-
isfaction in their own bodies that might more normally be taken from the body of a sexual partner.
Narcissism, per se, was not a perversion. A cathexis of the subject's own body was “a libidinal com-

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plement to the egoism of the instinct for self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed
to every living creature.”27 What Freud suggested was that the ego was initially formed and preserved from
fragmentation by attracting a libidinal cathexis from the id.
Freud continues, however, to consider that the process of ego cathexis inevitably leads beyond nar-
cissism and into megalomania. Excessive self love leads to fantasies of magical powers or tyrant-like behav-
iour that are not challenged until powers of critical judgment begin to contradict these fantasies, or until
they are contradicted by external persons or obstacles. Regardless of the source of the contradictions, the
pleasures of megalomania are not easily surrendered, and the solution to the problem of extreme infantile
narcissism is an internal division. The ego, rather than baldly believing that it is perfect, accepts its short-
comings, but retains its ego cathexis by shifting it onto an imaginary perfect self or 'ideal ego' (Lacan's i(a))
that is projected as an internal and/or external object. “What he projects before him as his ideal is the sub-
stitution for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.”28 Freud's solution to
Perry's problem of interest in immortality and universal peace was, then, that they were remnants of mega-
lomaniacal fantasies, wishes of a projected, supplementary ideal ego.29
In his work on narcissism Freud hypothesised the existence of a projected ideal ego. This ideal ego is
spatially complex in that it is an internal agency capable of watching the ego, but also appears to be an
external agency. It is created through an act of projection and can subsequently be projected onto people
or given created form in the external world such as a sculpture of a deity. Freud's psychological retheori-
sation of cathexis, however did not stop with the hypothesising of a structural ideal ego. Before applying
this theory to Judd, it is important to note that Freud noticed that in its dynamic functioning the ideal ego
had a way of coming back and addressing the ego as a super-ego, a conscience that measures the ego,
finds faults with it and creates a sense of guilt. It is also worth mentioning Freud's concept of a cathectic
economy, that there was a limited quantity of energy, and that the more it was spent on one object, the
less was spent on others. He proposed that the libido cathects firstly to its ego and then to external love-
objects and to internal objects such as the ideal ego. Given the limited quantity of libido, the more an
object is cathected, the less the ego is cathected. In the case of 'being in love,’ for example, the subject
forgets the ego in favour of a love-object. With all but one of Freud's revisions to his theory of cathexis
now in hand, to what degree is it possible to apply them to Judd's interest in space? Opinion on this will
no doubt vary, but the method calls for an analysis of Judd's ideal ego, its ontogenesis and cathectic
economy. The lack of information will necessitate speculation that may in part invalidate the construc-
tion. Yet, regardless of some of the details, it may still be possible to make some summary conclusions
about the psychoanalytic nature of a cathexis with space and its over all importance to an understand-
ing of spatial representational systems.
PRELIMINARY ONTOGENIC ANALYSIS

According to research into Judd's background, Roy Judd, Donald's father, had a job that required the
family to move often around Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Texas and finally New Jersey., “It was 'too much
moving' for a child and, as a result, he made few friends, which merely increased his natural shyness.”30
Putting this information about Judd's childhood along side Freud's first two hypotheses in the Ego
and the Id allows a preliminary construction. As a child he had little energy for a cathexis with other
children, suggesting that much of it was spent at home and, as a physical place, that home was regu-
larly taken from him by his father. One speculation would be that, in those episodes when his cathexis
with his own ego led to megalomania, he may have had pleasing fantasies of abundant control over

MARTIN • 71
space. The forced disproof of his megalomaniacal fantasies and a loss of his places of affection
occurred every time the family moved. This would suggest that his ideal ego was a self that had a
control and fixed possession of space, and that his super ego reproached him for lacking this con-
trol. To satisfy his fantasies and this reproach he later created DSS 33 to clarify and enjoy spaces
and to feel that he had control over them.31
There is some evidence in “Red and Black” that may support or modify this provisional con-
struction. After commenting that “The work is a great deal of knowledge about space” he then adds
that “I feel that I have the steam engine, but no tracks, or the gasoline engine, but no wheels.” This
comment suggests several possibilities. One is that he took a substantial ideal ego satisfaction over
his control and understanding of space, driven by a strong “engine” of cathexis, but that his ego
was weakened, left incomplete, by this. The image of incompleteness is ambiguous, suggesting an
anxiety due to a conflict. Even in Specific Objects there is the curious phrase already quoted, “So
far, considered most widely, three dimensions are mostly a space to move into.” Would “most
widely” be Judd's way of noting uneasiness and desire for control over space, rooted in some way
in his childhood experiences and the trauma of abandoning a specific space and moving into a gen-
eral space?
Judd's penultimate essay “21 February 1993”, written for his exhibition at the Pace Gallery,
contains this same note of trauma and desire over moving into space and elaborates on his strate-
gy for resolving it.
I found that if I placed a work on a wall or on the ground, I wondered where it was. I found
that if I placed a work on a wall in relation to a corner or to both comers, or similarly on the
floor, or outdoors near a change in the surface of the ground, that by adjusting the distance
the space in between became much more clear than before, definite like the work. If the
space in one or two directions can become clear, it's logical to desire the space in all direc-
tions to become clear.32
In this comment his primary cathexis seems to be with external objects. But there is also a note of
anxiety; he wants to know where his love-objects are in space. There is great affect in this moment
and it leads to a logical thinking. If he can know where his objects are in one direction then he can
know where they are in all directions, until space becomes as definite as the object. He then speaks
of how he attains this. “[It] requires more than a unit or it requires a space built around a unit or it
requires the amplification of a unit to an enclosure containing a great deal of space.”33 There is in this
quote a consistency with Perry's need for a physiological set of observable facts. Judd's adrenaline
rises when he does not know where the objects are, but it signals a thought, one that is conscious
only to a degree. Freud's hypothesis of an economy that prevents cathexis with objects competing
with a cathexis with the ego is one way to account for the 'other' thinking that is going on here. When
the id's objects are threatened by loss in space and anxiety arises, the id works in conjunction with
the ideal ego to control space. The ideal ego suggests this to the ego, which then works observation-
ally to clarify space in all directions. The result is that objects are secured and the ego is loved for hav-
ing made it all possible, even if it didn't think of the solution until goaded by the ideal ego/super ego.
In this construction what is remarkable is not the object cathexis, it is the way that space is drawn
into maintaining a narcissistic cathexis. His repeated assertions that there is no illusion or allusion in
the sculptures is here a ploy to the real thinking. It is not that the object signifies something else, it is
that the space signifies its otherness to itself, a fact that causes anxiety and that Judd wants to amend,

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to end, by making it ‘definite like the object.’ Yet to his deathbed he cannot quite make this conscious, his
knowledge fails him, the thought remains allusive.
Although there is a degree of sense in this construction, it seems incomplete. Donald felt that his art
works had to be installed with great care as if they were his children, and a structure of id, ego and ideal
ego, of the functioning of object cathexis, projection and megalomaniacal fantasies do not quite suffice in
explaining this. Judd's interest in space may have been as much a cultural and paternal inheritance. This
suggests the last of Freud's revisions of his theory of cathexis in The Ego and the Id, that of the introjection
of the object of cathexis leads to the structural formation of the “ideal-ego” (Lacan's I(A).
In The Ego and the Id Freud diagrams some of the internal spatial divisions of the psyche and further
elaborates a theory of the unconscious and its objects of cathexis. Turning his study to cases of melancholia
he found that an object cathexis may be introjected. When a person loses an object of cathexis, a process
ensues in which the object is set up inside the ego. “It may be that by this introjection…the ego makes it
easier for the object to be given up…,” Freud suggests that the ego is more than a bodily ego, more than
a rational, reality-testing psychical entity that evolves out of the instinctual id by virtue of its encounters
with external perceptions. The ego forms by a process of identification. It is, “a precipitate of abandoned
object-cathexes and … contains the history of those object-choices.”35 Through a process of introjection
the ego garners a quantity of cathexis that was once aimed externally. In this way the ego develops a sec-
ond type of ideal. Where the ideal ego derived from projecting a perfect self, this newly theorised ego-
ideal derives from introjections of idealised external objects. As Freud indicated, the range of love objects
that can be introjected is very wide and can include parents, admired persons, and (particularly for Lacan)
language, because all are external “others” that, when introjected, alter identity in ways that give the sub-
ject a myth by which to place themselves in the social and sexual order.36
INTROJECTIONS: HISTORY, FATHER AND SPACE

In Judd's last essay some of the most noticeable objects of introjection are artists whose formal invention he
admired because the work provided tangible satisfaction, what he called a sense of wholeness. He tells his
readers that his aim in making DSS33 was to invent a formal language that was personally satisfying and at
the same time unique in the history art. In the works he had made leading up to DSS 33 Judd had been
working a little with almost every established Abstract Expressionist formal language. This work was disap-
pointing because it remained in the already said of art history and this stood in the way of its ability to pro-
vide enjoyment. His early paintings were derivative, just introjective and, as a consequence, not good
enough. In his final essay he is very clear about his need for a formal language that rendered satisfaction,
and one that would be unique in the formal history of art. “When I was making the paintings and the first
three dimensional works I knew how far I had to go and how new the work had to be to be my own.
Pollock, Newman, Mondrian and all first rate artists established that distance.” His accomplishment in DSS
33 was that “color and three dimensional space were placed directly on the floor as one. Neither existed
before.”37
Attaching the strange cause of affect–the pipe–to the subject, with the help of his father Roy,
marked the advent of a privileged formal language, by creating a new position for phallic desire.
For Freud myths are introjected to resolve the subject's anxiety over his or her place in the social sex-
ual order, and contribute largely to the formation of religion and moral judgement. An examination of Judd's
moral art, though worthy, is not the purpose of this paper.38 For Lacan it was largely the symbolic that medi-
ated desire, through the Oedipus complex. Understanding Judd's introjections can go beyond that of the

MARTIN • 73
symbolic of ‘art history’ through a questioning of the role played by Roy Judd during the making of
DSS 33 in the light of Freud's theory of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, a resolution that takes
place via the introjection of the father's desire.
In the last phase of the heterosexual version of the Oedipus complex, father and son drop their
rivalry over the mother. With the emergence in the son of a new love object, the son comes to identi-
fy with the father's mode of desire, and seeks its sanctioning by the father as the first representative of
the social order. In “Red and Black” Judd comments that, “The new work seemed to be the beginning
of my own freedom, with possibilities for a lifetime.”39 Yet, at the moment in which the signifier of
phallic enjoyment emerges his father helped make the work, and the contribution may have been more
than his skills in wood working. Freud's theory would indicate that Roy acted as an intra psychic pater-
nal guarantor that adjudicated over and assented to his son's restructuration of his desire, his object
choices. ‘The warhead will be mated at the firing position,’ Judd said of Bontecou's eroticism, and the
pipe will be inserted into the wood, aided, says Freud, by the father's sanctioning of his son's new
cathexis.
According to the several stages of the Oedipal complex, the son repeatedly ponders the father's
desire. In the early stages of conflict there is the threat of castration, leading to the replacement of the
son's penis, one might say, by empty space. But there are other aporias to paternity than the violence
of the preliminary stages of Oedipus.40 In the later stages there is a substantial pondering of the father's
desire-the son can only introject the father's desire to the degree that he can grasp it. Just as the son
does not know where to begin in such ponderings, neither does an ontogenic construction. Both must
presuppose a desire to fill the empty space of a logical necessity-that the son introjects his father's
desire. But, what is ‘dad's desire’? The son sees his father's desiring gaze as it scans the horizon, and
yet when the son looks for the object of the gaze, there is no object. The cathexis, as a thrust of the
drives, has its aim, yet the satisfaction seems to have no object other than the law of space. There can
only be dubious biographical speculation here, but if this conclusion was made, then such a desire
was his to introject in the sense that sons introject what they understand of their father’s command to
desire. The son wagers that such a desire exists, and it is not so important whether it does or not, but
what it does for him in accepting the wager; it rivets the son's identity to the father. Julia Finch, at
least, recalled that she shared with her husband an erotic relation to space, through dance and
through sculpture, in which a law-like authority developed. In Specific Objects the rule of the clan he
delineated was to ‘move into space’, and once there, in the retrospect of Red and Black, space had
its own rules. More certainly, Judd's pipe was a found object of considerable interest, it was a literal
container of space subjected to a very complex displacement when he painted it “black as space”. He
paints the sign of the mons veneris love object onto the phallic signifier, an internal space that marks
the orificial place of desire. According to a Freudian rational the act of painting marks an acceptance
of the father's ban on Oedipal desire. The pipe is handed over to the father to be mounted into the
wood and psychically relocated. DSS 33 resolves more than a megalomaniacal desire to control space,
it resolves the Oedipal conflict with an identification with his father's mode of discharge, his cathexis
with vaginal space in a substantial redirection of genital drives.
A Freudian construction such as this suggests that there is so much loaded into this work that it
comes as no surprise to see that it was revisited several times over. DSS 33 becomes the first in a series
of sculptures made over the next twelve months, including DSS 39, DSS 41 and DSS 46. In this
sequence there is one important development in the treatment of space; the signifier of the phallus

(a) VI/1 2006

disappears behind a veil. DSS 39 might be regarded as a box configuration of his original thesis of DSS 33.
There is still a cadmium red light wooden structure and a pipe. The differences are that the wood structure
now has an internal space that cannot be seen and the pipe is straight such that its internal space is clearer
than before; the phallic signifier carries within it the object of its desire. In DSS 41 the pipe is absent leaving
its embedded trace and showing the internal space, where vertical 'walls' are placed at varying distances
according to a serial equation taken from the mathematician L.B.W. Jolley that calculates differences that
decrease to infinity. DSS 46 is the next variation, and consists of a longitudinally split pipe inset into the box
and painted in a separate color.
Why is it that the phallic signifier can effectively disappear? As Lacan remarks, the phallus is not a fan-
tasy, not a part object, it shows the subject its signifying place, it possesses a privilege of satisfying need
through its presence or its absence. Even when absent, it marks the power to satisfy or crush the need for
love. Perry's “specific longings” operate in relation to “specific objects” in the most veiled of ways. At the
end of this sequence none of the sculptures are given names, but uniformly called untitled. There is no need
of a named signified because a blank signifier is all that is needed to register the presence of phallic desire,
its privilege to name or not to name, to allow or not allow a signifiable into the domain of the signifier.41
Judd launched his critical and artistic career on a 'good riddance' to the space of…illusionism and of literal
space, space in and around marks and colors..For Judd it was good riddance to a culture with a neurotic
relation to space.Instead, space announced an ideal, a phallic 'truth' for the subject, that it was there in space
that 'you' are free to name your desire
THE SPATIAL SIGNIFIER

In the register of the Lacanian symbolic the space of the signifier, between the signifier, can mark a phallic
presence. Space can be the signifier of the desire of the Other, the signifier of enjoyment as such.Space can
be the phallocentric guarantor of meaning in sculptural objects and in language. Added to this, in the reg-
ister of the imaginary, the object of the ideal ego, the object a, can be space.
This construction does not imply that Judd's work or
life had pathological qualities. It may help explain why
Judd's vast estate at Marfa became such a focus for his later
life. It was a chance to manifest his ego-ideal and its need
to show a paternal stewardship towards his work and the
work he collected. On the side of projection Marfa mani-
fested his ideal ego, which may help explain why some
critics have found it such a “megalomaniac's fiefdom”42
The work speaks of a certain phallic confidence of a
whole 60s generation, including feminists, who assuredly
sought to dismantle a traditional symbolic system and
replace it with one of their own making. Judd captured
and conveyed a radical sense of the power of phallic
desire as space, effectively replacing the post-war anxiety
of space as void and abyss. And, as his writing on Bontecou
attests, this was a power that was available regardless of
biological gender and worthy, in the Kantian sense, of uni-
versal assent. His treatment of space as the site of phallic DSS 39 Judd Art  Judd Foundation Licensed by VAGA, NYC 2007
enjoyment put the spectator into a formal language in
MARTIN • 75
 which the space around the sculpture bid them
to have and to be this enjoyment. Resisting all
deconstruction, the work promulgated the most
profound beliefs of his generation, in an enjoy-
ment that could not fail, yet would never be.
notes

1 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd:

DSS 41 Judd Art  Judd Foundation Licensed by VAGA,
NYC 2007
Complete Writings 1959-1975, The Press of the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design, Nova Scotia, 2005,
p.184.
2 Ralph Barton Perry, General Theory of Value: Its
Meaning and Basic Principles Construed in Terms of
Interest, Longmans Green and Company, New York
and London, 1920 and 1926.
3 Ralph Barton Perry, “Value as Any Object,” in
Sellars and Hospers, eds., Readings in Ethical Theory,
Meridith Corp, 1970, quoted from Frances Colpitt,
Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective, Seattle, The
University of Washington Press, 1994, p. 124. Italics
added.
4 The particular example I would cite is his comment
on Barbara Kruger in Judd's “Some Aspects of Color
in General and Red and Black in Particular,” Donald
Judd, Nicholas Serota, ed., Tate Publishing, London,
2004, p. 149.
5 Frances Collpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical
Perspective, Seattle, University of Washington Press,
1993, pp.123-125, gives an account of this difference,
but underplays Judd's “collector's mentality”.
6 Perry, General Theory of Value, p. 27.
7 On the origin of the word cathexis and its relation
to the word interest see, Darius Gray Ornston, “The
Invention of 'Cathexis' and Strachey's Strategy,”
International Review of Psycho-analysis, 12: 391-399
Part 4, 1985.
8 Freud, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, vol III, James Strachey, ed.,
London: The Hogarth Press, 64. (Hereinafter SE)
9 Judd, "Specific Objects" This quotation is from John
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
vol. I, II.xxi.29.
10 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, John I. Kay & Co, p .524
11 Briony Fer, On Abstract Art, New Haven: Yale

(a) VI/1 2006

University Press, 1997, p. 148. Fer suggests in this quote
that what is most salient to an understanding of Judd in
respect of his specific pleasures and anxieties is what it
may say in principle about pleasure and anxiety.
12 Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine,
January 1963, also in Donald Judd: Complete Writings
1959-1975, p. 65.
13 Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” SE
VII:135-243. This is the essay that Perry cites in its first
English translation of 1910.
14 Perry, General Theory of Value, the chapter on
“Value as the Qualified Object of Interest,” pp 52-80.
poses the question whether interest directs itself towards
an object or whether the object draws interest toward
itself because of its properties.
15 Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” SE
VI: 184.
16 Judd consistently used “untitled” for his works, giving
rise to the convention of citing the DSS catalogue num-
ber to reference his work.
17 This initial interpretation does come rather close to
contradicting Judd's claim that the sculpture in no way
referenced bodily gestures.
18 Freud and Breuer, “On the Psychical Mechanism of
Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication,” SE
II, p. 6.
19 Donald Judd, “Lee Bontecou,” Arts Magazine, April
1965, 59-75, also in Donald Judd (2005) p. 178.
20 Donald Judd, “Lee Bontecou,” Donald Judd: (2005) p.
178.
21 Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and
Red and Black in Particular,” Donald Judd (2005) p.
148.
22 Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and
Red and Black in Particular,” Donald Judd (2004), p.
156.
23 Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and
Red and Black in Particular,” Donald Judd (2004), p.
145.
24 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Donald Judd (2005),
p. 184.
25 Perry, General Theory of Value, p. 25.
26 Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” SE XIX:39.
27 Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” SE XIV:74.
28 Freud, op. cit, SE XVI:94.
29 Perry and Freud align quite well here. To Freud the
two great wishes of the id are for perpetual self-preserva-
tion (immortality) and homeostasis of cathectic energy
(universal peace).
30 Roberta Smith, “Donald Judd,” Donald Judd: A
Catalogue of the Exhibition at the National Gallery of
Canada, Ottowa, 24 May–6 July 1975 Catalogue
Raisonné of Paintings, Objects and Wood-Blocks 1960-
1974, Brydon Smith, ed., Ottowa, 1975, p. 4. Roberta
Smith does not provide a source for this quote. The third
person tense of the sentence implies that it was not Judd
but perhaps a friend or family member who was the
source.
31 A Lacanian analysis might proceed differently. Tracing
the projection of a 'mirror stage' ideal ego would concen-
trate on one of Judd's other important concepts, that of
wholeness. In this analysis specific objects conform to the
projected ideal of an ego that is not composed of frag-
ments, but is corporeally unified and able to act and
move in space.
32 Donald Judd, “21 February 93,” Donald Judd: Large
Scale Works, Pace Gallery exhibition catalogue, New
York, 1993, p. 10.
33 Donald Judd, “21 February 93,” Donald Judd: Large
Scale Works, p. 10.
34 Interview with Rainer Judd by Joe Nick Patoski,
January and March 2001.
35 Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” SE XIX:29.
36 The introjection of 'the symbolic' is largely developed
by Lacan.
37 Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and
Red and Black in Particular,” Donald Judd (2005), p. ??
38 David Raskin, “Judd's Moral Art,” Donald Judd,
Nicholas Serota, ed., Tate Publishing, London, 2004. This
essay provides an valuable reading of Judd's use of Perry
in formulating a concept of a “biopsychological energy”
created by his “specific objects,” p. 91.
39 Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and
Red and Black in Particular,” in Donald Judd (2005), p.
156.
40 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde
and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1985, pp. 258 and 278.
41 Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Ecrits: A
Selection, Routledge, 1977, pp. 281-291.
42 Yves Alain Bois, “Specific objections: Yve-Alain Bois
on Donald Judd in London and Minimalism in New York
and Los Angeles,” Artforum, Summer 2004.
MARTIN • 77