The first issue of Wet: the Magazine of Gourmet Bathing dropped through the letter boxes of the editor’s friends and fellow artists in Venice, California, in the summer of 1976. The hand-written logo dripped down the black-and-white cover, a grid composed of silhouettes of a female figure in different stages of taking a bath and the text was in a typewriter font. Subsequent covers featured a semi abstracted photo of bodies writhing in mud and legs (trousered male and swimsuited female) striding across a garden sprinkler. Such visuals were characteristic of Wet’s absurdist world view and erotic charge, which, over 34 issues, established itself as cult zine with an international following and is now the subject of an exhibition at Macro in Rome.
What exactly ‘a magazine of gourmet bathing’ was didn’t seem to matter, at least not to its founder, artist, editor, designer, publisher and writer, Leonard Koren. He has described the magazine as ‘a spirited assault on good taste and linear thinking’. Its pages became a space for experimentation in which photographers, artists and writers were invited to express their ‘bolder, brasher, weirder visions – unfettered’. One issue famously featured a cartoon strip by Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame called Forbidden Soaps, where a rabbit extemporises on his relationship with a bar of soap that eventually gets eaten by a dog; frothing at the mouth, the dog is presumed rabid and gets shot. Memorable covers featured Debbie Harry as a pistol-blazing cowgirl (pictured top) and a Herb Ritts photograph of a young and then unknown Richard Gere bare-chested and cradling a small anatomical doll .
One of the last issues featured two pigs copulating along with the strapline ‘SEX WITH THE DEAD: Art or Atrocity?‘, which Koren recalls had an ‘unsettling effect among the magazine’s advertising staff’ and got the magazine banned from many of its usual sales outlets.
The exhibition, What why Wet?, is timely given the recent revival of interest in zines from the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Usually modest publications produced independently, zines were the voice of subcultures and the punk scene in particular. When Koren hit on the idea of Wet he had just finished architecture school and was looking for something to do. At college he had become fascinated with the psychological space of the bathroom and the rituals enacted there. He began to use it as the subject for performances and held parties in bathhouses. At the time in the US in particular, these had been co-opted as social and cultural centres by the gay community.
The exhibition celebrates the angular graphics and collage aesthetic that exploded creatively over the page, often riffing on the themes of sex and performance art. The many different visuals on display at Macro reflect the freewheeling range of Koren’s contributors. The cover of Issue 7, showing a model blowing seductive bubbles, was designed by April Greiman and Thomas Ingalls. Koren writes: ‘I thought of April’s manic-cool, off-kilter floating punctuation marks and squiggles as “deconstructed Alpine Swell meets Joan Miró”.’ The look didn’t have a name then. A year or two later, when the nascent experimentation had jelled into a recognisable style, designers began referring to it as New Wave and then, a few years later, Postmodern.
True to Wet’s anarchic, freewheeling, boundary-defying attitude, the lower portion of the gallery wall at the exhibition has been left blank as an invitation for visitors who care to get down to floor level to comment. It's a characteristic Koren gesture, slyly reactivating the now vintage subject with new voices and thus creating a frieze with a life of its own.
Leonard Koren: What why Wet? continues until 27 August 2023 at Marco: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma. Details: museomacro.it
