An Artistic Logic of Practice: The Case of the Performer

The place and importance given to creative, original and aesthetic acts by a culture, is also part of the daily, culturally determined and passed on ways of coping with the world. Artists, as other people, develop their activities and interests inside a broader society and as thus acquire habituses proper to their society. As the artist moves inside an artistic domain or community with its own passed on and handed down action and interpretation patterns, he or she will consciously and unconsciously, in implicit and explicit ways, take in the techniques, interpretational styles and different knowledges concerning the artistic domain. Starting from the habitus in Aristotle's, Mauss' and Bourdieu's writings, I will stretch this notion towards the artistic realm of music practice and inquire into the possibility and necessity of an artistic expert habitus. Music performance demands the re-enactment/execution of previously imprinted and embodied expert practices. Such practices can be called an artist's expert habitus, combining embodied schemata and artistic expert know-how. The schemata structure perception, thought, action and communication that can be adapted and reco-ordinated in specific situations. I propose to consider the artistic performance act as a situated instance of the performer's expert habitus. After an introduction on the notions of habitus and artistic practice as socially and culturally defined and contextualised phenomena, this article will consider the acquisition of an artistic logic of practice, its relation to society, its specificity and the idiosyncratic trajectory of the artist.