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Peter Wegner
The United States of Nothing, 2007

Artwork Info

Artwork title
The United States of Nothing
Artist name
Peter Wegner
Date created
2007
Classification
installation
Medium
neon, vinyl, and paint
Dimensions
144 in. × 312 in. × 3 in. (365.76 cm × 792.48 cm × 7.62 cm)
Date acquired
2008
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Accessions Committee Fund purchase
Copyright
© Peter Wegner
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2008.179.1-018
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Wegner on why he chose to explore nameless places

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transcripts

NARRATOR: 

Names of towns, blinking on and off like stars in the sky. Towns like Nameless… 

 

PETER WEGNER: 

Nix or Nonesuch, or Lost Corner. 

 

NARRATOR: 

Artist Peter Wegner 

 

WEGNER:  

I had been looking through atlases, and eventually found my way to these things called gazetteers. Essentially just lists, typically alphabetic, of cities, strange patterns start to suggest themselves to you. And when I came across the first instance of a town called Nameless. I was just dumbstruck. 

And then when I came across the second one, I had a feeling of disbelief. And then there was actually a third. And at some point, I realized I had gravitated towards a set of names, all of which had to do with this quality of nothingness or namelessness. 

And they constituted a kind of map, but like, a map of nowhere. So the utility of the map, the point of the map seems to have been misplaced somewhere.  

 

NARRATOR: 

So how do you make a map of…nothing? 

 

WEGNER: 

So the piece begins in nothingness. And then youll get just a little flicker of neon for a couple of seconds over here, and then maybe youll have another flicker of neon in a few different places.  

And only at the end does all the neon come up at the same time. It had a kind of self-canceling quality to it. It seemed, on the one hand, to be, like, really emphatic and assertive. And there was this enormous expanse of wall that I was going to dedicate to it. And then on the other hand, it seemed to be occupied by almost nothing, by little pieces of twisted transparent glass. And every once in a while, it would illuminate, like a little firefly, and then it would go away. 

Which seemed to me to be everything I needed to say as an artist.  

So for me, its a perplexing piece. Often what I feel in the world is perplexity. It asks the viewer to experience with me, some of the— the oddness and— and incidental beauty of the world I find myself in. 

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Other Works by Peter Wegner

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