New Yorker cover by Gretchen Dow Simpson
As a teenager, Leonard Koren designed and built a full-scale Japanese tea house out of scavenged materials, such was his desire to create at a young age. Later he pursued experiments in photographic processes at UCLA and quit school in 1969 to co-found The Los Angeles Arts Squad — a mural-painting group that executed large outdoor works, including a 500-square-meter “Beverly Hills Siddhartha” that was a year in the making. Now comes the real fun part: from 1972 to 1976, Koren created “bath events,” plus unusual bathing environments and works on paper related to bathing, such as the fold-out book “17 Beautiful Men Taking A Shower” which was followed by (not surprisingly) the screen print “23 Beautiful Women Taking A Bath” — which is how we get to WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing which made its debut in 1976 out of Venice, California (that wonderful haven of fabulous artists of all genres). ”I was making bath art,” says Koren in the preface of his soon-to-be-released Imperfect Press book: Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. ”This involved getting people to take off all their clothes and then bathe, according to my detailed instructions—in either water, mud, hot air, or steam—while I took photographs. Afterward I assembled the images into more complex visual artifacts, usually lithographic and silkscreen prints. I sold these in galleries and through word of mouth.” The story of the making of WET magazine is the subject of Koren’s new book (he’s already authored 14 books) where one is taken behind the scenes of one of the premier avant garde publications of the 1970s whose contributors included such promising young talents as Matt Groening and Matthew Rolston to name but a few who found creative outlets within the magazine’s colorful pages. The pictures and words in WET had a quirky, prescient editorial sensibility about them which helped catalyze new graphic styles that would later be known as New Wave and Postmodern — such was the influence of WET. (via)
