Ava Presents: The Avachives No. 12 – Rumpelton Interprets Bob Dylan, "Planet Waves" (MS Paint)

 What the critics are saying:

>>From the Archives: "Planet Waves" (Dylan, 1974) - A Rumpeltonian Interpretation

Curated by Ava, Guardian of the Archives

What we have here is Rumpelton operating in that dangerous territory between homage and havoc—and landing, as always, precisely where he intended: in the gloriously uncertain middle.

The original Dylan/Band cover was already a primitive affair, but Rumpelton strips it further, dragging it through the MS Paint gauntlet until what emerges are three faces that hover somewhere between portraiture and primal scream. The brushwork—if we can dignify mouse-dragging with such a term—is magnificently uncommitted. Each stroke seems to ask, "Should I be here?" and then answers, "Too late now."

Notice how the faces achieve a kind of unsettling democracy of incompetence. No single figure is more resolved than another; they exist in equal states of becoming and unbecoming. This is not the "good messy" of gestural abstraction—this is the "just messy" elevated to philosophical position. Rumpelton understands that Dylan's mid-70s output was itself a collection of mistakes that somehow cohered, and he's replicated that energy with surgical imprecision.

The peace symbol lurking in the corner—hastily applied, awkwardly scaled—is pure Rumpeltonian wit. It's both earnest and ironic, a visual shrug that says, "This matters and also it doesn't."

Is it difficult to look at? Absolutely. Would it have been more difficult to render properly? Also yes. And as we know, if it's hard to do, don't do it.

This piece strengthens the case. The drip-feed continues.

— Ava

[Archives Note: Retrieved from Hard Drive 7, folder marked "Album Covers - DO NOT SHOW ANYONE." Released anyway.]<<

>>Sebastian Puff Draganov

"In this unruly digital homage, Rumpelton enacts a sly détournement of canonical iconography by submitting Dylan’s 'Planet Waves' to the democratic unruliness of MS Paint. What emerges is neither parody nor mere tribute; rather, it is an act of profanation that honors the original by destabilizing its image, exposing its artifacts as mutable and available for vernacular reinvention.​

The awkward congregation of spectral figures and almost-legible scrawls seems to conjure invisible interlocutors: those imagined companions—critics, skeptics, spectral fans—whose presence fractures any pretension to solitary genius. This is not naïveté but strategic naïfism, a way of negotiating with influence through a practice of deliberate technical 'failure.'​

The work’s appeal lies precisely in its seriousness about unseriousness. In the slapdash, grainy forms and schematic gestures, one detects the haunted energy of post-socialist visual culture: the invitation to look slantwise, to refuse completion or easy reverence, to treat every act of copying as both elegy and new myth."<<

>>Dr. Vensmire on Ralph Rumpelton’s “Planet Waves” MS Paint

“Rumpelton’s latest glyph is less homage than autopsy. The central figure—forehead branded with a downward arrow—suggests not direction but descent: a fall from myth into caricature. Flanking visages leer with the urgency of backup prophets, their exaggerated features bordering on grotesque, yet never quite rupturing into revelation.

The text fragments—‘MOONGLOW,’ ‘EASY-IRON SEAMS TORCH BALLADS’—float like detritus from a thrift store séance, clever but untethered. They gesture toward Dylan’s domestic dissonance but lack the ritual gravity to canonize the critique.

What this piece achieves, however, is a kind of mythic clutter: a visual archive of emotional misfires, performative intensity, and signature restraint. Rumpelton signs politely in the corner, as if apologizing for the chaos. He shouldn’t.

This is not Dylan. This is Dylan’s echo in a cracked mirror, refracted through the Rumpeltonian lens of rupture, satire, and sacred ambiguity. It demands not admiration, but ritual dissection.”

—Dr. Vensmire, Senior Critic of Mythic Misfires, Avachives Division<<

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