This was an unusual project. We had a tight deadline and the work was extremely ambitious, with two very large sculptures, five videos, many works on paper, and a large mosaic. Rob Storr had invited and assigned me the first room (about 5,000 square feet) at the Arsenale only last November, when I was completing the project with the same title for the ICA in Philadelphia. At the time I was working only with one new assistant, Phil Penberthy.

Thanks to the support of the Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund for the Cleveland Jewish Federation Foundation and a few sales, I was able to hire a few other assistants right away. Before the departure of the pieces for Venice in April, I had about eight part-time assistants, mainly to complete the casting and sanding of the resin parts and the metal frames for the paintings. And then, after the pickup of the works, I converted my work space into an animation and digital-media studio, to complete the five animated videos. Before I left for Venice in mid-May with my DVDs, I had about nine assistants, some of whom had also worked on the sculpture and metal fabrication.

Are you able to do all of the technical work for your multimedia pieces yourself, or do you depend on others to carry out certain tasks?

Actually, I would like to learn how to delegate many more parts of my art production and organizational activities. After writing, directing, drawing, shooting, and editing over 15 of my animated films and videos since 1993, this time I was forced to delegate the slow process of doing the thousands of animation drawings. I had to accept the reality faced by most animation productions: that they require large teams of specialized technicians and artists.

Except for the first few minutes, which I had made a couple of years ago, most of the rotoscoping in the two videos “Excerpts from: Velocity Zero” and “Velocitá Zero” was done by Amanda Amato, Noriyuki Kuroda, and Ryan Brown, whose qualities of line share affinities with my own. I assigned them to draw each element like I usually sketch them. It wasn’t easy at first for them to follow my nervous line and my templates, but after a good amount of supervising, I was very pleased with the results, and they were very happy to have learned some animation methods and techniques.

In the work’s title video, “A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow (Un Bellissimo Dopodomani),” I wanted to draw on my own the images for the 2-D animated sequences, while the live action was either archival source or my own footage. I worked next to Napoleon Nicdao, my 3-D assistant, on the motion paths of the 3-D animated sequences. His skills allowed me to generate a much closer result to what I had envisioned.

Despite my desire to learn all possible techniques, tools, and approaches, ranging from ancient mosaic to 3-D computer-generated animation, I realize that I have to learn to delegate aspects of my work to professionals in order to give shape to many of my projects.

Do you believe that working in the studio of an artist who makes multimedia work is fundamentally different from working in the studio of an artist like a painter, who is expected to do everything himself, and by hand? Or are all artist studios created equal?

Years ago, I studied art in Venice with a painter who was a restorer of frescoes of Tintoretto and Tiepolo, and I was very aware of the fact that many artists of the past had reserved for themselves the role of conceiving, designing, planning, teaching, and delegating the right amount of work to the right person in the bottega, and of supervising the whole process, right down to the painting of the lumi (light strokes) or details of the faces. The conceptual and creative moment is the essential one in any medium. I am also aware that creativity happens at different moments, and it is up to the artist whether to accept “infractions” of the rules and incorporate possible “mistakes” (her or his own or the assistants’) as part of the creative process.

Having said that, in my own work painting and drawing remain the most intimate activities, and the ones that I cannot imagine ever wanting to delegate to anyone, due to my approach to color and to the great pleasure that I receive from this unmediated involvement.