A laudable exhibition, Collecting & Collectivity unites notable works by seven artists and/or collectives to investigate the notion of collecting and collaboration in contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition marks the culmination of a series of related events—a symposium at Southern Methodist University, a panel at the 2008 College Art Association Annual Conference and an allied issue of ArtLies (Winter 2007)—that have allowed co-curators Noah Simblist and Charissa Terranova to demonstrate how collecting and collectivity, traditionally distinct and opposing concepts, commingle in the pluralistic mélange of today’s art production.

Danica Phelps and Daniel Lefcourt, two of the better-known artists in the exhibition, consider how the practice of collecting perpetuates an art object’s aura (in the Benjaminian sense). In Artist, Collector, Curator, Spy (2002) Phelps visited galleries while posing as a collector, culled photographs of artworks she desired, drew copies of these artworks, curated exhibitions of her drawings, and attempted to buy the “originals” with her copies as currency.

Like Phelps, Lefcourt challenges the conception of artworks as singular,market ready goods by working in a reproductive medium and circumventing the gallery. Added Value (2006), an editioned piece sent out as gifts by a collector, includes a DVD of the artist tapping a screw to a battery-operated contraption—electricity is produced each time the artist physically contacts the contraption, satirizing the value of the artist’s touch.

Otabenga Jones and Associates’ Nation Time Traffic (2008) presents a particularly poignant engagement with the avant-garde tradition of disseminating political information via art. Nation Time Traffic consists of dozens of stacked black trashbags bound like bricks of narcotics—one is sliced, revealing a dark sandy substance that spills onto the floor. A fictional newspaper article explains that a “hip hop gang” was arrested for the trafficking of black tar heroin, but that it was later discovered that the bags actually contained soil; nonetheless, the men were to remain in custody until other charges could be brought against them. To put this work in the context of the exhibition’s themes emphasizes how racial stereotypes and profiling thrive on collective ignorance.

Basekamp and David Dempwolfe’s Group Isolation Tank (2008) embodies the exhibition’s themes most successfully. Situated in the front gallery at Conduit, the piece resembles a large art-shipping crate with three numbered doors. Entering through one of the doors, the viewer steps into a mass of Styrofoam peanuts. Once inside, her experience fluctuates according to chance between that of isolation and collective encounter.

The works in the exhibition blur the boundaries between the practices of collecting and the collectivity as they are linked to radical art practice, ultimately illustrating that both the individual and the collective facilitate (art) ownership and authorship.

Alison Hearst is a writer living in Fort Worth. She recently received her M.A. in art history from Texas Christian University.