Where Pop art and pop music converge

PROVIDENCE - "Mommy, Daddy, come and look at me now/ I'm a big man in a great big town" sing the Talking Heads in the 1977 song "Pulled Up." "I feel so strong now 'cause you pulled me up!"

That's where painter Carl Ostendarp got the title for his show at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art. That track and songs by Jane's Addiction, the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, and many others make up the exhibit's soundtrack.

The show features just a mural and two canvases by Ostendarp, mounted alongside several prints and drawings from RISD's collection by artists whose work has influenced his, such as Andy Warhol and Jean Arp. Artists who have pulled him up.

The exhibit is like a cocktail party crowded with people in the know - winks and inside jokes whip around the room. At the same time, with its urbane but rocking soundtrack and its revelry in gorgeous color, jazzy gestures, and Pop aesthetics, it's the kind of party where anyone would feel welcome. Most of the work comes from the 1960s and '70s, when Pop and Minimalism deflated the bloated self-importance Abstract Impressionism had taken on and liberated artists to borrow from pop culture, work in multiples, and pare down to the bare bones of visual language.

Ostendarp's own work has a graphic, comic-book punch, with pulsing tones and bold, iconic images. He uses text in the two paintings here, "Aaarrgh" and "Yaaah," in which the words tumble down canvases in shades of orange and salmon pink. The mural coats the gallery in that same pink, as if a behemoth of a house painter has thrown a giant bucket of the stuff at the wall and let it ooze nearly to the bottom, where it ends, undulant, above the orange along the base. Wall text calls it a "drip" wall mural, in a nod to Jackson Pollock, but if this is one of Pollock's drips, it has grown so large that we can't see beyond its edges.

Ostendarp has always been an art-world insider; he broke onto the scene in the early 1990s with ironic, out-of-proportion send-ups of color-field painters and Expressionists, and this isn't the first show he has curated exploring his aesthetic family tree. We see a little Pollock in his work, a good dose of Roy Lichtenstein, and some tone-contrast experiments that recall Josef Albers's concentric square works. They're all represented here, and more.

Lichtenstein's "Quiet Sea and Sky" (1965), a fresh and unexpected abstract landscape from the king of cartoons, is made of mylar and a reflective plastic film, divided by a horizon line in the artist's familiar dot pattern - a duotone piece that echoes and literally mirrors Ostendarp's mural. A vaporous, untitled 1970 screenprint by color field maven Jules Olitski takes Ostendarp's warm, flat palate and breathes spaciousness into it.

Here's another insider tip: Warhol, whose chilling 1971 screenprint "Electric Chair" is the most realist image in the show, curated objects from the RISD museum's collection in "Raid the Icebox I" 40 years ago - and set a benchmark for artist-curated museum shows such as this one. And the Talking Heads? RISD alums.

It's fun to skip around the room and make your own associations. Why is John Wesley's flat-toned, comic-book graphic, ironically voluptuous "Untitled (Bird Lady)" (1965), with nipples as big as a baby's pacifier, hanging near Barnett Newman's "Untitled Etching #1" (1969), featuring three of that artist's vertical black "zips" subdividing a white page? They're so different - Wesley explores surface, Newman creates space - yet each in its own way is tart and aggressive.

The urgent lines of Joan Miro's comical, biomorphic "Dog Barking at the Moon," a 1928 charcoal drawing, push the edge of known reality into nightmares; they seem in concert with those of Jean Arp's untitled, undated woodcut across the gallery, which looks like a game of tic-tac-toe warping, as if on film, into a flashback sequence.

The group is A-team, yet eclectic. It might not cohere in a white cube without Ostendarp to hold the pieces together. Floating on a sea of pink along with the angst-ridden yet goofball implications of "Yaaah" and "Aaarrgh," it makes perfect sense.

Speaking of angst-ridden yet goofball, Shih Chieh Huang's charming multimedia installation "Connected: Eject before disconnecting" whirls, flashes, and buzzes neurotically through the darkened third-floor video gallery at the museum. It's a series of ditzy but endearing little robotic figures crafted from electronics, empty bottles, plastic bags, and dismantled household appliances. Apple users will recognize the title as a warning related to their iPods and computers.

Motion sensors individually set off the glowing elements of the installation. It's a closed system, with smaller units - each has a vaguely human shape - tweeting and humming around one larger piece. That one has a video monitor at its center with a DVD of human eyes (but no nose) moving independently of each other, "breathing" plastic sacs for lungs and tentacles. It's the mother ship, or maybe just the mother, of the smaller, chattering pieces.

Made of throwaways, with a Wall-E sweetness, each piece is dependent on the others. It's a trashy ecosystem, but it hangs together. To all the robotic critters knocking about within it, it's home.