Data Arte No. 23
Barbara Radice

21 x 29.5 cm

$275 Available (1)

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Barbara Radice is the only non-designer/architect among the founders of Memphis, and yet she was one of its central contributors. She produced the rationale and articulated the position for the project in a way that allowed it to be more than a passing venture. She is responsible for historicizing the project in writing and publications as it was happening. What’s truly fascinating is that she wrote about the founding of Memphis (the one that appears in the first Memphis catalog from 1981) appears, in part, in an essay she wrote about Ettore Sottsass for Data Arte magazine in 1976 (four years prior to the founding of Memphis).

In the canonical story that appears in 1981 and again in the 1984 Rizzoli book that really cements Memphis as a historical project, she says that on a night in December 1980 when many of the founding members gathered at Radice and Sottass’s apartment in Milan, “By chance the music on the record-player kept on referring to Memphis. So Memphis now happens to be the name for that desire to act which had been the reason for the meeting in the first place…”

But this is curious, because the title of  the article Radice published about Sottsass in 1976 in a semi-obscure Italian art/architecture journal call Data Arte is “Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Blues,” and the entire piece uses the Dylan track as a metaphor for Sottsass’s work and describes how the record played on repeat during their meeting for the interview. So the idea of “Memphis” was clearly something she’d been thinking about long before the December 1980 meetings that spawned what became Memphis. 

This is the publication that contains Radice’ early premonition of Memphis. 

VG, light rubbing, toning, wear.