— Can we move on to another big project you did – Madonna's probably most political visual for «American Life». Was there an intention to scandalize? Do you think art can influence politics?

— Art has a possibility not exactly to change the world, but to be a platform of expression; it gives an opportunity to alter people's perception. I don't think an artist is a politician, though some people intend to do some kind of political art. But with artists like Hans Haacke, I don't think it really reaches the audience he is addressing.

I like that you noticed that about Madonna's record cover because, you know, when people ask us what we think about her album covers, I always reply, not as a provocation, that the one we did was the best one, as far as you can go with such a persona. It was completely opposite working with Bjork, where we could access the density of the human being, whereas Madonna is a symbol. She is more like a vehicle than an inspiration source. At that time she wanted to deal with a kind of reconfiguration regarding American society, she wanted to be critical. But right in the middle of making it very clear and out, she sort of retracted. Which is the reason why, I think, this album never went completely through, and it's a really good album of hers. And just to finish this, I think it's very important, when you address something, that your message is as clear as possible.

— You have worked with all possible media, but seem to prefer books. What do you see in that medium?

— We've been working on books since the beginning. For me there are two very efficient ways of archiving reality: movies and books. Books are preeminent for us, they are efficient. Movies are good for another way of archiving. So, if I combine the two, I succeed to pass the memory to the following generations.

— At the dawn of M/M Paris you revolutionized the art of the atrical poster. Could you tell us about that?

— It happened really early in our career. We met stage director Eric Vigner, who was appointed to run a theatre in Lorient, a small harbour town in Brittany. He's allowed us to try a new way of talking about theater. So today we have this series of posters, about 80 of them, that follow both the style of the theatre and our idiosyncratic vision.

Why are they revolutionary? Because we completely changed the code of the theatre poster, where instead of just being an illustration of a play, each poster is our own interpretation of the play. And we are currently working on the book, which will have the complete series of these posters.

— Now could you tell us about your long-lasting collaboration with Yohji Yamamoto? How in your experience the Eastern notion of beauty is different from the Western? Was it hard to bring them together for Yamamoto?

— I think, ironically, there is this kind of a secret relationship between France and Japan. If you look at the history of art, Japan has influenced European tastes ever since we started sailing there. Even in they have nothing to do with each other, there is this kind of...

— Romance!

— Yes (Laughs), a secret romance. Well, it's a funny thing. Russians think that they have a very special romance with France, too, and recently I discovered that Georgians think that about themselves too! (Laughs) Anyway, back to Japan, there was always this love-hate relationship.

And I think this is what happened with Yamamoto, too. I think Yohji has always understood that his style was extremely Japanese, but always investigated cultural aspects of French fashion. And he reads the symbolism of French fashion and translates it very sensually through his creations. For me, that's the biggest difference between him and Comme des Garçons. Rei Kawakubo has more of a conceptual approach, and Yohji is a great reader. And I think he knew a long time before we started working, that he needed European people to translate his idea of beauty. Because for me, a Japanese woman wearing his clothes doesn't really exhale the curiosity of his work. I am not against the Japanese, I am just saying that it really works when you have an archetypically blond woman wearing his clothes; the contrast speaks.

Working with him was very enjoyable, it was a way to go through all the mechanisms of fashion image making. It was as if we went through palette of expressions, through all the spectrum of how to make a fashion image. And it was very good for us, because we had a chance to work with the photographers from different backgrounds and generations, big fashion models, to have a very open creative experience. So, it was basically working with incredible clothes that were covering a wide range of the history of fashion. For six years we were able to issue books promoting a collection every six months. And the collections weren't just about selling the product...

— It was a poetic approach...

— Yes, he was not just promoting, say, a new bag, he was promoting a vision; and this vision was very post-modern in a sense that he was crushing together the spectrum of time. To conclude, we learned a lot, and he also learned a lot. Even if we exchanged only five words during these six years, it was very fulfilling for both sides.

— A big body of modern art deals with finding identity. Is it a relevant question for you?

— Yes, this why we are called M/M, these are our initials. We could have been called MA/MA because we have symmetrical initials for last names, too. And I think working in the public sphere makes it important to define your identity. And who you are is not just what you do. To understand the message, people have to understand you. If I am no one, I will never make myself understood. I need to point out to the source of the message. And it's not about exposing my private life. It's about making the message consistent.

— How can you manage to draw this fine line between commercial work and art?

— By trying to redefine it every day. The assumption with us is that art is an object of commerce. When we started, we could never foresee that there would be so many art fairs. There are more art fairs than fashion weeks now. There is an art fair every months and soon it will be every week. So, it's a marketplace. First, you have to define art as an object or an idea. Then, it's easy to put the price on the object, but it's almost impossible to do so with an idea. It's a question of copyright. So somehow art has no value, if we are thinking in terms of art as a procedure. Art is: is what I do still coherent? Is it still held by more than one person? Does it provoke a discussion? And if not, you go further away from the essence of art. Anyway, this is complicated, and we haven't found a solution yet. Maybe we were more about how to ask the right questions, and now the idea is more how to find the way of answering them.

— Do you consider yourselves art rebels?

— No, I think our approach is more, – it may sound immodest, – philosophical; it's important to us to formulate the right questions. Only then something coherent can be built. When people come to us, often they don't have properly formulated question. Maybe this is why we seem revolutionary, or as you said like rebels, in a sense that the clients are convinced that they have the right questions, but the first step for us is to convince them that they are wrong. It's proper to ask questions, so we take an approach to reformulate them.

— Do you think the artist should have a mission? And do you have a mission?

– Mission is a big word, it's more like a belief. As an artist you believe that you are able to change the world in a way that it could be more in tune with the humans that are inhabiting it.

— So your ambition is to make this world a better place?

— We could never dream of that! It's more about making the world in sync with our ideas and beliefs instead of saying that we can change the whole world. (Laughs) Let's say, it's more how we can change the world at our scale according to our visions.

Interview: Kamilya Kuspan for Étage Mag
Date: April, 2016