Robert Longo’s “Black Flags” operate on the viewer like black holes. At first glance these objects are sullen, indecipherable, and opaque. On closer inspection, however, they reveal themselves as references to flags that seem to have been freeze-framed as they flap in the wind; they appear soft, as if indeed made of canvas, and the stars, stripes, and stitching are all discernible. In point of fact, each work consists of a bronze cast, made by the lost wax method, of a genuine American flag.

Though these works seem to collapse inward both literally and textually, they are, nonetheless, freighted

Poring over Judy Fiskin’s tiny images is a little like searching the grounds in the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee for a last sip of sweetness; her dense photographs represent a world reduced to a concentrated visual sediment. This exhibition of 15 framed gelatin silver prints entitled “Some Art,” (all works 1990) offers up a wildly diverse array of art objects, including a painted crouching tiger, a 19th-century engraving of tobacco jars, several assortments of glass ornaments, and a vignette from The Iliad, found on a Wedgwood plate.

When shrunk to 2¾ square inches and mounted in identical

It’s heartening when artists successfully expand their vocabularies, and the 11 pieces in this exhibition, entitled “Innocence Betrayed,” show that Karen Carson has done just that. Employing inflamed imagery, Carson has zeroed in on a sense of ironic anger more acutely than ever before. Each piece is a composite image made up of smaller pictures, arranged in a sort of dark insignia that suggests coloring book nightmares. Rendered in india ink, marker, charcoal, and pencil, with collaged elements, the works are framed in gothic, funereal wooden frames. Carson covers each image with a poison-green

As the war between high and low culture wages on, Robert Williams, a former decal and comix artist turned easel painter, continues to assault his viewer’s eyeballs relentlessly. Cerebrally, one is bound, gagged, beaten, and cut to ribbons by these meticulously rendered full-color deliriums. Indeed, the works are so visceral that one half expects a grisly soundtrack of heckling, shrieks, and flesh chewing. It would seem virtually impossible to accommodate this material without a certain distance and not be rendered dysfunctional.

Since the obscene rears its head everywhere in these psychotic