Santa Monica

A single Jenny Holzer electronic sign in a group show may look like flash-in-the-pan gimmickry. But an entire gallery devoted to these winking, letter-spitting, red-on-black LED (light-emitting diode) signs--as well as motto-inscribed marble benches--makes the New York artist’s mordant vision of vox populi brilliantly clear.

Holzer’s one-liners (mostly from her “Truisms,” “Living Series” and “Survival Series”) deal with matters of morality, behavior, politics and pop psychology. “It’s scary when the veins are so close to the surface,” says one sign. “Crime against property is relatively unimportant,” says another.

The signs streak into existence and dissolve into the black hole of a contemporary attention span. The phrases are spoon-fed regurgitations of a babbling world, with reading speeds timed by an electronic Big Brother. Unscrolling in a gallery (rather than, say, in a bank), these pronouncements all sound equally dubious--as if surrounded by mocking quotation marks.

Crisply carved in rows on the benches, Holzer’s “found” remarks assume the ironically old-fashioned mold of lines of famous poetry or the “deathless” sayings of the great. Casting ephemera in stone, to be read and re-read at endless leisure, was a clever strategy after the fizz of electronics. Holzer seems to have assured her place as an artist catching the likeness of this thin-blooded, homogenized and over-marketed era. (HoffmanBorman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to April 9.)