WET MAGAZINE: Bathing to the Next Level

WET, Issue 3 (October/November 1976)

WET MAGAZINE: Bathing to the Next Level

WET, Issue 4 (October/November 1976)

WET MAGAZINE: Bathing to the Next Level

WET, Issue 2 (October/November 1976)

WET MAGAZINE: Bathing to the Next Level

WET, Issue 6 (October/November 1977)

WET MAGAZINE: Bathing to the Next Level

WET, Issue 7 (October/November 1977)

WET MAGAZINE: Bathing to the Next Level

WET, Issue 9 (October/November 1977)

WET MAGAZINE: Bathing to the Next Level

The darling of the 1970s American underground press, WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing challenged societal taboos and artistic conventions without ever taking itself or anything else too seriously. Among the kinds of subjects one could see covered in the pages of WET were surveys of Southern California pool culture, taste tests of bottled water, a rating of swimming holes across America, soap reviews, how-tos on building bathtubs made of redwood, architectural interventions, interviews, artists’ projects, essays on the origins of seltzer, mud baths, and always plenty of nude people. “WET was a combination of a certain intellectual discipline I learned from — or was reinforced from — architecture school, combined with an artist’s impulse to not plan too far ahead, to be responsive to the moment, to really drink up the zeitgeist,” says Leonard Koren. The former artist with a master’s degree in architecture from UCLA, was the founder of the now iconic bimonthly magazine which had its editorial offices in bohemian Venice Beach. WET’s first issue, which appeared in the summer of 1976 in an edition of 600, humbly consisted of black-and-white-printed sheets of 17 x 11-inch paper folded twice. With each ensuing number WET was envisioned anew: between its first 14 issues, the magazine’s logo was reworked seven times, its size shrunk and grew, graphic styles were upended, and interpretations of bathing broadened to encompass oral hygiene, religion, comics (one notably by Matt Groening, who went on to create The Simpsons), bondage, sports, politics, food, fashion, drugs, and celebrities. Deborah Harry graces the July/August 1979 cover, in another Henry Miller talks turning 80, and in yet another Jack Nicholson quips, “Gourmet bathing? Do I look like the kinda’ guy who takes a bath? Shit — I don’t even drink water.” In 1981, after five exhilarating years, Koren pulled the plug on WET. “There was something personal about WET, about making art, and I want the things I publish to be imbued with that sense of something personal that’s not out of a factory,” says Koren about why he quit the magazine after 34 issues. Since then he’s continued to author and independently publish design and philosophical books through his Bay Area imprint Imperfect Publishing. And the author of design and philosophical books including Which Aesthetics Do You Mean? Ten Definitions and Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers still thinks a lot about water: “The way I really feel these days is that I’m grateful for any body of water to get into. The determinant of a great bathing experience has more to do with my frame of mind than any kind of environment.”

Text by Tiffany Lambert.

Images courtesy WET.

Taken from PIN–UP 22, Spring Summer 2017.