Chapter 11: Sculpture and Art Installations: Toward A Cultural Psychological Analysis

In his paradigm-setting inaugural lecture, Jaan Valsiner proposes a method for developing “new knowledge through what we know already—by feeling into the not-yet-known” (Valsiner, this volume). Exploration of unknown future insights is nourished by interdisciplinary dialogue with Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle and the Danish tradition of arts and humanities. One of the avenues for research opened up in this exploration is a cultural psychology of sculpture. Valsiner considers the bronze sculpture by Galata Morente, a lounging elongated figure situated in a public park. The sculpture is an attempt to make certain meanings persist in time, to prevent forgetting. Sculptures are also interactive, inviting tactile and ambulatory exploration. The question is, what role does such art have in human meaning-making? And more specifically, what can cultural psychology learn from examining such sculpture as meaning-making?