“I like this job because nothing’s typical,” Wahler said. “I mean, of course I have meetings with the staff, meetings with donors, meetings with faculty from the community here, but also I’m traveling. ... I’m meeting artists, and basically I’m going where the artists are because I want to meet them in their studio to see the art they’re doing.”
Wahler was appointed to director of the Broad last March and began in July, according to the Broad’s website. Wahler succeeded Founding Director Michael Rush when he passed away in March 2015.
“That was really tough, and I think as an organization we did a really good job without a director, but we are very happy now that he is here and that he’s providing such strong vision for the museum — we were really in need of that,” director of public relations at the Broad Whitney Stoepel said. “He’s got a good sense of humor, he brings tons and tons of experience to this position, so it’s really an honor to be able to work with him.”
Wahler first became interested in art as a teenager when he was thinking about pursuing a career in drawing or painting, but when he organized his first show, he realized he preferred putting the shows together over creating art himself.
“From that point, I started working in museums as a curator and then as a director,” he said. “But basically what I’m interested in is being in contact with the artist, trying to understand the way they look at things and understand our world and trying to bring tools for them to materialize their vision.”
Wahler’s way of meeting with artists and viewing contemporary art might be seen by some as unconventional. When talking with artists, he tries to talk about anything but contemporary art, he said. While Wahler hails from a small town in Switzerland where he said “no one was interested in contemporary art,” he has found a way to engage audiences.
“What I’m doing is trying to find the right vocabulary and right language to be used when I try to talk about and when I try to show art,” Wahler said. “For me, when someone tells me, ‘I don’t understand,’ or ‘It doesn’t speak to me, it’s nothing,’ yeah, of course. You don’t have the right type of language. ... But it’s like, art is the same. If you start picking up on some words or some elements, then you can feel things better, you can enjoy and then at the end, you can speak.”
The path from Switzerland to East Lansing allowed Wahler to collect years of experience and prestigious awards in the art field along the way. In Switzerland, he helped create an art center that is now filled with galleries and artists. From there, he traveled to New York to run the Swiss Institute, which he helped transform from a national cultural institute to an international contemporary art center. After, he went to Paris to run the national art center, Palais de Tokyo. He also created another art center in Paris, Chalet Society, where he organized shows in an old school in Paris and around the world.
Wahler was drawn to East Lansing because of the realization that he could continue collaborating with artists and researchers in a city smaller than New York City or Paris. Now in East Lansing, Wahler continues to have researchers and artists collaborate on contemporary projects, he said.
“That’s like a dream for me because you have all these fantastic specialist researchers here — I don’t have to go to Tokyo or Moscow to meet them and have artists collaborating with them,” he said. “And of course it’s a university museum focusing on research — for me that’s super important. I’m always trying to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing and where does it lead, and this involves research.”
Now that Wahler is at Broad, his vision for the art museum includes expanding the reach of the museum’s influence through these collaborations. One way he does this is by continually networking with artists, he said.
“Well, one of the challenges is to bring the museum to a broader audience,” Wahler said. “One of the challenges I basically created is to consider the museum not only as a hub where people will gather, but also as a connector, meaning the museum connecting to different type (types) of communities, to different type (types) of international communities.”
To Wahler, it’s through the Broad program that the vision of the museum is materialized. Wahler said he wants a museum not to be a destination point for the day, but instead an instrument that can be used again and again.
“So my aim is trying to infuse this way of looking at things into our daily life, which will work as a tool for people,” Wahler said. “If you can look at things like artists are looking at things in our daily life, trying to re-enchant the world in which we live, and which means one thing could have several interpretations, then it’s much more fun.”
One of the best ways for Wahler to stay creative is through his job as a director, he said.
He sees art as a space where anything can become possible, where things that are impossible outside of an exhibition space suddenly become possible.
“(Art is) like a house — either you decide that everyone has to enter through the main door, in such a big house, people have some problems to find this main door and they could look around the house and, not finding the main door, get discouraged, or you could say any entry point is good,” Wahler said. “You could enter through the windows, through the first floor, second floor, you could enter through any entry point. It’s good. There’s no hierarchy. And if you say that, people will enter. And once you’re in, you see the house and you understand what is at stake.”
Currently, the Broad staff is preparing for a large exhibition in the spring called “The Transported Man.” The name comes from a famous magic trick in which an object appears, disappears and then reappears as something else, Stoepel said.
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“It’s all about belief systems, so the viewer has to bring their belief to art or an object in order to believe in it,” Stoepel said. “So we’ve just started preparing for that — we’re really excited about it — it’s going to be a huge group exhibition that will take over the entire museum. That’s something we’ve never done before, so activating the entire museum will be a really fun way to sort of introduce Marc-Olivier to the community here and the community at large.”
Above all, Wahler said he is looking to engage the MSU community in contemporary art. He is currently working on about 15 different projects outside of the museum to raise interest in the community, he said.
“This museum is a university museum,” he said. “It’s for the students. And also not only for, but with the students.”
