SANTA MONICA

Ronnie Cutrone is one of those bad-boy, tongue-in-cheek artists who draws on the spirit if not the exact letter of Pop art. Where Pop embraced the ‘60s media glut and all of popular culture, Cutrone plays with cartoon imagery and popular myths to make disturbing social observations. Associations are free enough to assure that we never really know where such artists stand vis-a-vis the issues they allude to, but they make us nervous enough to take notice.

Cutrone shows a huge sewn and painted American flag with a cartoon character holding what looks like Liberty’s torch but ends up being a messy paintbrush. Can we glean from this that art-ism has supplanted nationalism as the new institution of choice for the BMW set? Two grotesque comic-strip nudes are topped with the head of Woody Woodpecker and a Picasso-ish mask. Other works incorporate real skateboards, fake fried eggs, references to Greenpeace, “classic” still lifes a la Lichtenstein and passages of optical art.

If you can get beyond the cutesy Looney Tunes vocabulary of Bugs and Tweedy--and that is sometimes difficult--you find montages that elbow Americana (including the hallowed institution of art) in its most banal and self-important soft spots. (Robert Berman Gallery, 180 Marine St., to Oct. 26.)