CM: You have said, “I am interested in producing work that is, in itself, the site of conflict.”

JLM: Artworks are not peaceful. The tradition of combining two things and attempting to reconcile them in an artwork is a symbolic position coming from Catholicism, but I prefer to put together the parts of a conflict and let it be visible in the work. I don’t try to solve conflict; I try to show it.

CM: Is conflict a starting point?

JLM: No. I live the conflict. The starting point, I think, is revolt.

CM: Against what?

JLM: Stupidity, hypocrisy, injustice.

CM: Do you see yourself as militant?

JLM: No. Militant means “belonging” to a party. I’m an artist. I’ve been involved with militants. But with groups, it’s always better to just be passing through. They all end up producing new constraints.

CM: With pieces like Objets de Grève (1999–2000), did you feel that you ran the risk of being instrumentalized?

JLM: It was part of the project. I did these images with the idea that they would be reproduced. I think Objets de Grève is my most exhibited piece; it has been shown in all kinds of places and in all kinds of formats. But that’s normal. It means that the work lives without me—and works have to take on their own lives. It’s when I cut my link to a work that the public can engage with it.

CM: Several of your pieces were distributed for free—in newspapers, for example. Is the process of dissemination part of the work?

JLM: No, the work is something concrete—the newspaper, not its diffusion. I’m thinking more and more that all these movements that have moved the artwork away from the material and the sacred are really problematic. Nowadays, it’s as if the institutions were making the work. They don’t need artists. And the most annoying thing for them is the material. If you make a virtual project, even if it’s very critical, it’s fine. But if you make a three-ton piece, you create a problem.

CM: Was this your thinking behind Body?               

JLM: Of course. Imagine the price! And someone had to pay for it. When I did the newspaper pieces distributed for free, someone paid for them to be made, but this part was hidden. This is a problem. Now, if I made more newspapers, I would charge one euro. People trust what costs. When it’s free, there’s no value. It’s like with the city. Often you see beautiful things: events, feelings, sensitive things. But the only way to make them interesting is to sacralize them. Art is for that. A lot of readymades are just translating beautiful things from the street into the museum.

CM: Is the way you work with photography also a process of sacralization?

JLM: Of course. But what’s interesting is that photography has almost no weight. Photography is just a circulation of feelings, without the weight of the readymade. It changes things—it’s a system of metamorphosis.

CM: Tell me about the film you are shooting for your exhibition in Oxford.

JLM: It has to do with the old tradition of the Three Graces, from the Judgment of Paris. With the Three Graces, we go back to the notion of conflict. Paris has to choose between three possibilities: power, war, and love. The Graces always look very similar because basically it’s the same woman; it’s a trinity. I’ve been working with the idea of disjunction for a long time. These concepts continue to be alive, and society is becoming increasingly disjointed. Everything has turned into a vector going its own way. Complexity arises from there, and no one is interested in what is common. To show that, I’m putting together three girls who look very much like each other. In the film, they are standing five feet away from each other, each one acting alone. Their physical resemblance is the only thing they have in common. I tried to highlight the conflict between oneself and the activity of the group.

CM: You’re working on a series of “knot” objects, some in bronze and some in glass.

JLM: First, we have to understand what a knot is. The idea is to produce tools to describe complexity. So back again to the conflict, and to the idea of making visible. Think of chaos: The best way to represent chaos is with a stream of water, a turbulence. If you throw a rope in it, there’s a moment when it’s going to form a figure. It could be a simple circle, or it could be a trefoil or any number of other figures. Knot theory was created to try to describe the activity of electricity. Nowadays we also use it for biology, weather, all kinds of systems, but it’s just a describing tool. And my utopia for artworks is to create tools.

CM: To make sense of the world?