Letters from the field #4 - Work Work Work

Thinking about work in an illustrator studio in Brooklyn

“What about creativity?” one of my professor, an anthropologist of art, ask me when I’m done presenting my research plan for my fieldwork last year. “Through everything you just said there’s the creative act that you don’t mention, no?”. My omission was intentional. Despite regularly being called the ‘creative industry’, I rarely remember my professional work as an illustrator as particularly creative in the classic sense of ‘creating new ideas’.

My desire to challenge assumptions about how creative the creative industry is came from a desire to value the lives of the people who make images without relying on romantic tropes of self-expression and (neo)liberal values of individuality. Too often, these tropes have been used to justify a winner-takes-all industry in which only a few get to make a decent living while the rest can only hope to fight for scraps. As a result, one’s failure to succeed is then displaced to individual artistic merit instead of on systemic dynamics (erosion of copyright, stagnation of rates, increased competition, turn-over of stylistic trends, etc.).

An accurate representation of labour in the illustrator studio I worked in.

“Creativity is more a brand for the industry than a reality” I answered, “Commercial artists work, they churn out images day in day out, whether the inspiration is there or not, whether they feel like it or not, whether they’re asked to create something new or reproduce the same thing they’ve done before”. Of course, this answer reproduces a dichotomy between creativity and labour as if these were necessarily opposite, they’re not, but I think it’s a necessary shortcut at the moment. More than ever actually.

I just concluded 3 months of observations in an illustrator studio in Brooklyn. And what I observed was indeed, labour. Day in and day out. I often joked with my studio mates, 5 illustrators and animators, that it was so exhausting to observe them because they worked so much. Around 6pm, when it was dark out and I was already completely depleted, I would look behind me hoping for someone to call it a day, only to realize they would stay in for several more hours. Eventually I made peace with being a bad anthropologist and was often the first one to leave the studio. These long days, preceded and followed by the 50 minute commute to and back from the studio, followed by cooking dinner, made me realize how much New York will siphons time out of you, in a way I had never experienced before.

These 3 months have been humbling, and over the weeks I grew a deep respect for the work ethic of the illustrators I observed. I don’t know what people outside of this world think illustrators do all day (”people who actually work and not people who sit in little attics and create pretty pictures and sit around daydreaming all day”), but what I observed was hard, sustained labour. We tend to hear about information capitalism, and the creative class, but that labour also had a physical cost. Regardless of how intellectual the work is, the workers still have bodies. Bodies that often hurt. Most of us in our thirties, we routinely talked about how much maintenance our bodies required these days, and what 10 hours spent hunched over an 11 inch Ipad Pro does to one’s back.

But maybe the most impressive feat of the kind of labour I observed for these 3 months, is the quality of the products that resulted from it. It’s hard to explain how someone can draw 10 hours a day, 5 days a week (sometimes more), and yet produce images that all have the same quality. Of course, I can already hear some of them say “No Julien, this project I’m not happy with, it looks terrible” but we all know that, from the exterior it all looks great. That’s when the ideals of creativity and the reality of labour meet again, and make the work of illustrators way harder than most people imagine.

Even though they have to churn out work (especially in New York where the cost of living is ridiculously high and requires to take on so much), illustrators also have to deal with the cultural requirements of artistic work. Each commodity that an illustrator produces has their name (and style) indefeasibly attached to it. One can hardly botch a project, for once this project is out in the world, it functions as an ambassador for the person who made it, and represents the quality of their work to others. This puts commercial artists in a double bind whereby they need to be as productive as any worker under capitalism, but they also need to care about the quality of each commodity they produce and put as much of themselves in it as possible. This is why I called style an ‘intimate commodity’.

This experience got me thinking about my own relationship to work as an illustrator. I grew up in a rural part of the south of France, in a very working class environment. My father was a trucker and my mother a nanny. To them, no value was more important than work. ‘Doing good work’, being the best at one’s job, etc. were the only requirement they had for me growing up. I’m a also a Taurus, so yeah, I’m all about that hustle. Dragging along a working class background in the entrepreneurial project that is freelance illustration wasn’t easy. I didn’t realise how much my personal history would intersect with the structure of creative work I described above.

The routine precariousness that forces freelancers to say yes to everything, along with the pressure of ‘doing good work’ no matter what (and in addition to perform the persona of the grateful artist online), got filtered and intensified by the anxieties that come with social mobility. For many years I was unable to draw a line between the personal and the professional, because being validated for my work was a proof of the success of my personal journey from country boy to worldly creative.

Being an immigrant on a temporary work visa in Canada at the time didn’t help either, and I remember distinctively the constant feeling of restlessness, the sense that I had to deserve my stay. In the US, many people I talked to on the prized O-1 visa for ‘extraordinary aliens’ echoed that feeling, merging together feelings of isolation and performance, artistic worth and productivity, making a living and growing a sense of home.

The dream of the ‘creative class’ has erased many stories of the daily work and personal stories that led people to become ‘creative’. Looking at labour is an important part of reintegrating these stories in the narrative of the creative industry.

There’s so much more I could (and will) write from the past three months. I’ve learned so much about illustration, illustrators, New York, and I’m so grateful for the brilliant group of artists who welcomed me. Witnessing the daily grind of working illustrators, and in light of that reflecting on my own experience with creative work will, I hope shine a light on why this work is important.

More than ever, we need to value the work of illustrators not just for the illustrations they produce, but for the labour they put in it everyday. As images circulate online, we take them for granted, as some natural resources ready for the taking. Generative AI companies understood that better than anyone else. But they are not. Images are labour. Artists are workers.