The New York Times International - 05.08.2019

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2 | MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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people aren’t investing in women’s

sports in a huge way right now? Prob-

ably 75 percent of the people going to

Major League Soccer games — are

they going because they’re hard-core

soccer fans or because it’s a cool expe-

rience? The M.L.S. marketing is great,

the branding is great and it’s a fun

atmosphere to be a part of. I feel like

women could have the exact same

thing, but for some reason people

aren’t investing in it.

I bet that plenty of people who started

paying attention to you over the last

month or so may not know that not

long ago there were questions about

whether you had a future with the

national team. What changed for you

as a player and person to get from

there to here?

Quite a bit. Physically, as an athlete,

player who rejected the White House,

the story might have been very differ-

ent.

I can’t imagine that for the people who

were upset, my being a pink-haired,

unapologetically flaming gay lesbian

was sitting well. They were probably

like, “Oh, you’re so in our face!” Rather

than being a regular white girl in the 1

percent, I have a totally different per-

spective on things, and it’s the basis for

all the activism that I do. I don’t feel

like I’ve experienced a lot of homopho-

bia or people hanging out of windows

calling me a fag or anything, but being

gay has shaped my life’s view.

When it became clear that the conver-

sation around the World Cup wasn’t

just about soccer or gender equality

but also had the added political ele-

ment of your conflict with the presi-

dent, were you anxious about being at

the center of that?

I made the choice to participate in the

political discourse a long time ago.

Obviously tweets from the president

ratcheted everything up by a million,

but I feel very comfortable talking

about politics, so I don’t think it was a

conscious decision of getting involved

or not. I understood the gravity of

what was happening, and I realized

that it needed to be balanced with

performance and making sure the

team was good and not distracted.

Do you have any sympathy for the idea

that sports should be a nonpolitical

oasis?

I don’t understand that argument at

all. You want us to be role models for

your kids. You want us to endorse your

products. You parade us around. It’s

like, we’re not just here to sit in the

glass case for you to look at. That’s not

how this is going to go. Yeah, I don’t

[expletive] agree with that concept at

all.

I’m curious: Where did the arms-wide

goal celebration you were doing during

the World Cup come from?

It was probably born out of a little

arrogance. Like, are you not enter-

tained? What more do you want? And

it was sort of saying to Trump — but

more to detractors in general — that

you will not steal our joy from us as a

team, as the LGBTQ community, as

America. It was kind of a [expletive]

you, but nice.

Have you always been so self-confi-

dent?

I started that way. Then in middle

school and high school it got really

awkward. Gender roles started to be a

thing, and I didn’t know that I was gay,

frankly, until I was in college. Until

then I was like, everythingfeels weird.

I think being gay, it’s like you’re not

going to ever be normal, so you don’t

have rules, and if you don’t have to

follow any rules, all bets are off. A lot of

my confidence comes from that, from

not feeling societal pressure to be

anything other than what I want to be.

My natural disposition is to have confi-

dence, but certainly, figuring out that I

was gay, I was like, oh, God! Looking

back, it’s embarrassing because, duh.

What was it about college that allowed

you to realize you were gay?

Redding, California, where I grew up,

is quite homogeneous racially, and

sexuality-wise and politically. It was all

kind of the same thing. I didn’t have a

repressive or oppressive childhood by

any means, it was just “gay” was never

spoken. Once I got to college and these

things started to be named and there

were other gay people, I was sort of

forced to think for myself. It was, oh,

well, thisis a thing, and thatis a thing,

and this is why people are Democrats

and this is what liberal means, you

know? It’s like, I’d known things be-

fore, but they’d never been named.

For people who may not have been

following your team’s lawsuit against

U.S. Soccer, can you explain some of

the changes you want to see in addi-

tion to gender pay equity?

The lawsuit covers a lot. In a broad

sense, it’s about equal investment and

equal care of both the men’s and wom-

en’s sides. Whether it’s youth team

programs, marketing, the branding of

the team, how they sell tickets, what

they spend advertising money on,

what they pay each side, what they

spend on support staff, what they

spend on coaching, what’s the travel

budget — it’s all of that. The compen-

sation is sort of the last big part. With-

out having everything else equal, it’s

hard to have a conversation about how

much each team is worth, because

each team’s value and potential isn’t

being reached. At least ours is not. I

don’t know exactly what they’re doing

on the men’s side, but I suspect they

deserve more pay as well. Both of us

are cash cows for the federation, and

they’re certainly making a ton of

money. I’m not sure that we’re sharing

in that.

Why has women’s professional soccer

in the United States struggled to get to

a healthier place?

I’m at a loss for why there’s not more

investment. The national team is

wildly popular, making tons of money,

growing exponentially, so do you have

an idea other than sexism as to why

you can do whatever until you’re in

your late 20s. When you turn 30, you

evolve your style of play and how you

take care of yourself physically, or you

just get old and retire. I feel incredibly

lucky that I met my girlfriend, Sue,

right around that time. It was 2016,

after the Olympics. I’d made it back to

the Olympics but probably shouldn’t

have been on the roster. I wasn’t ready.

I was just coming off this ACL injury, I

was 31, I was clearly not what I was

before. And in meeting Sue, she’d had

knee injuries, and she changed her

diet, her workouts, and she’s been able

to have an incredibly long career. I

intentionally did that change and

started focusing a lot more on recovery

and rest and taking care of myself,

getting super fit. So meeting Sue was

fortuitous for me, in many senses.

You and Sue are among a handful of

star female athletes who are publicly

out. There are zero men in that posi-

tion in the four major American profes-

sional sports leagues. What might

account for that, and what might cause

things to open up?

I think homophobia in sports accounts

for that, but it’s also more than just

homophobic culture. Life-changing,

generational wealth is at stake for

these guys. I think they’re scared to

death to lose that. You’ve made it this

far, no one in your family has ever

done something like this, you and your

family have the opportunity to live a

completely different life for years and

years, and you don’t want to risk that.

But obviously there must be so many

gay male athletes, and it’s probably an

open secret with a lot of them. It seems

crazy, though, that not one major star

has ever been out.

What can you share with me about how

you celebrated winning the World

Cup?

Well, I live my best life in celebration

mode. My performance in the World

Cup was good, but I was thinking all

along, Just wait until I get to the cele-

brations. I love celebrating. We’d been

cooped up for 50 days together. To be a

team that is expected to win all the

time — it’s exciting when you do, but

it’s also this massive relief because it

would be a huge letdown if you didn’t.

Then to win in such spectacular fash-

ion! You get to revel in it for days. You

get to do whatever the [expletive] you

want. That’s what I was telling the

girls, especially the first days that we

were back after winning: “This is the

time that nobody cares what you do.

You can ask for anything, you can do

anything. Live it up. You’re never

going to have this time again.” It’s so

special and crazy and so much fun.

Soccer star has a few things to say

R APINOE, FROM PAGE 1

Adapted from an article that originally

appeared in The New York Times Maga-

zine.

Megan Rapinoe, center, was awarded the Golden Boot as its top goal-scorer and the Golden Ball as the best player at the Women’s World Cup and became an activist-athlete icon.

RICHARD HEATHCOTE/GETTY IMAGES

Carlos Cruz-Diez, one of the most promi-

nent Latin American artists of the post-

war era, whose immersive paintings

and installations set color in motion,

stirring overpowering bodily sensations

in the viewer, died on July 27 in Paris, his

adopted city. He was 95.

His family announced his death on his

website.

Mr. Cruz-Diez, who was from Vene-

zuela, where he was addressed as

“maestro” and where a museum in Ca-

racas bears his name, achieved interna-

tional renown early in his career in

1960s Paris.

He was celebrated in major North

American museum shows, including a

2011 retrospective at the Museum of

Fine Arts in Houston and a 1993 survey

of Latin American art at the Museum of

Modern Art in New York.

He also completed many large-scale

public installations at sites around the

world, including the Simón Bolívar In-

ternational Airport near Caracas, the

Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines railway plat-

form outside Paris and the walkway to

Marlins Park, the baseball stadium in

Miami.

Rigorously theoretical yet exuber-

antly experiential, his works challenge

viewers to appreciate color as “a reality

which acts on the human being with the

same intensity as cold, heat, sound, and

so on,” he wrote in 1975 in a publication

put out by Denise René, his Paris gallery

at the time. (He wrote extensively on

color theory.)

Mari Carmen Ramírez, the curator of

the Houston retrospective, said in an

email, “He made us see and experience

color as a pure and sensuous pleasure; a

participatory, interactive experience

open to everyone, regardless of age,

class, culture or social standing.”

Building on chromatic experiments

by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionists

and the artist and educator Josef Albers,

among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-

lief paintings of multicolored cardboard

or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate

as the viewer moves past them. These

works, which he called “physichromies,”

dating to the 1960s, were included in

many exhibitions of Op Art and Kinetic

Art, including MoMA’s movement-de-

fining but critically lambasted 1965

group show “The Responsive Eye.”

His other signature works, labyrinths

of colored light that he called “chro-

mosaturations,” plunge participants

into a series of intense, stimulating and

sometimes destabilizing “chromatic sit-

uations,” as he called them.

“So intense is the light that the colors

seem to be felt rather than seen, like

heat,” Holland Cotter of The New York

Times wrote in reviewing “Carlos Cruz-

Diez: (In)formed by Color,” a 2008 retro-

spective at the Americas Society in New

York. “The sensation is slightly disori-

enting, dizzying, as if gravity had been

tampered with.”

Mr. Cruz-Diez’s interest in “launching

color into space,” as he once wrote, and

his desire to create accessible interac-

tive environments, have influenced

many younger artists, like Olafur Eli-

asson, Tauba Auerbach and Ivan

Navarro. They share Mr. Cruz-Diez’s in-

terest in “light and color as a sensorial

experience,” Estrellita Brodsky, a col-

lector, philanthropist, curator and advo-

cate of Latin American art, wrote in an

email. (She organized the Americas So-

ciety exhibition.)

Mr. Cruz-Diez was well aware of this

visceral, public-facing aspect of his lega-

c y.

“It is only now, happily, that people

are realizing that a great number of the

art movements of the last 30 or 40 years

come out of kineticism,” he told Ms.

Brodsky in a 2010 interview in Bomb

magazine. “Installation art, conceptual

art, participatory art, interactive art,

happenings, street art — we did all those

things.”

“What we called ‘environments’ later

became installations,” he added. “Now

young people read this work differently,

and what they’re doing is called interac-

tive art!”

Carlos Eduardo Cruz-Diez was born

in Caracas on Aug. 17, 1923, to Mariana

Adelaida Diez de Cruz and Carlos Ed-

uardo Cruz-Lander, during the latter

years of the dictator Juan Vicente

Gómez’s long rule. Mr. Cruz-Diez spoke

of his father as a poet and intellectual

who made his living at a soft-drink fac-

tory; both parents, he said, were sup-

portive of his art career.

Carlos was attuned to phenomena of

color and light early on; the catalog for

his Houston retrospective said that at

age 9 he was transfixed by the red pro-

jections on his white shirt caused by

sunlight streaming through cola bottles

at the plant where his father worked.

He attended the School of Visual Arts

and Applied Arts in Caracas, where he

befriended Alejandro Otero and Jesús

Rafael Soto, who would become his

peers in geometric abstraction and the

Op and Kinetic Art movements, respec-

tively.

A successful design career in Caracas

followed. Mr. Cruz-Diez was artistic di-

rector of the Caracas branch of the ad-

vertising firm McCann-Erickson from

1946 to 1951 while he continued to paint

in his spare time. He married Mirtha

Delgado Lorenzo in 1951 and started a

family.

As an artist he was restless, however,

finding himself increasingly dissatisfied

with the social realist paintings of

shanty towns he had been making —

“paintings that depicted poverty and so-

cial problems (which I couldn’t solve)

for rich people to collect,” as he told Ms.

Brodsky. He turned to making abstract

sculptures and paintings with movable

parts that could be manipulated by the

public.

Mr. Cruz-Diez was increasingly

drawn to abstraction and to the idea of

developing his own movement or lan-

guage, as Kazimir Malevich and Piet

Mondrian had done. But that seemed

impossible in Venezuela, which was un-

der another military dictatorship, that of

Marcos Pérez Jiménez.

“Amid the dictatorship of Pérez

Jiménez, the artist or intellectual had no

reception at all,” Mr. Cruz-Diez told Ms.

Brodsky. “We’d be at a party and all of a

sudden a military would show up and we

would have to flee like flies.”

In 1954, he uprooted his young family

and followed Otero, Soto and other

school friends to Europe, setting up a

base in the Catalonian town of El Mas-

nou, near Barcelona. He made frequent

trips to Paris, where in 1955 he was

struck by a group show of Kinetic Art,

“Le Mouvement,” at Denise René. It in-

cluded works by Soto, Victor Vasarely

and Jean Tinguely.

Inspired and “full of hope, sketches

and projects,” he said, he made a brief

return to Caracas, where he opened a

graphic arts workshop and kept refining

his abstraction, completing his first

physichromie in 1959. But he felt misun-

derstood by an art world that was still

enamored with figuration.

By 1960, Mr. Cruz-Diez had settled

permanently in Paris, where he experi-

enced, as he said in a video on his foun-

dation’s website, a “creative euphoria”

of competing movements, including

Arte Povera, Pop Art and Fluxus as well

as Op and Kinetic Art.

By the end of the ′60s he was well

known outside Paris and Caracas. He

had shown at MoMA in “The Respon-

sive Eye” and at the Stedelijk Museum

Amsterdam, in the 1961 Kinetic Art sur-

vey “Bewogen Beweging.” He had been

awarded the International Prize for

Painting at the São Paulo Biennale of

1967. And he had represented Venezuela
      at the 1970 Venice Biennale.
      He is survived by his son Carlos Cruz
      Delgado; a daughter, Adriana Cruz Del-
      gado; six grandchildren; and one great-
      grandchild. A second son, Jorge Antonio
      Cruz Delgado, died in 2017. Mr. Cruz-
      Diez’s wife died in 2004.
      Although he lived under oppressive
      dictatorships and through periods of so-
      cial unrest and economic volatility in
      Venezuela — as well as long stretches of
      prosperity that stemmed from the coun-
      try’s oil reserves — Mr. Cruz-Diez gen-
      erally avoided commenting on these cir-
      cumstances in his art.
      “I was never very political,” he told
      Ms. Brodsky. “I once sat in on a Commu-
      nist Party meeting and realized that in
      order to join a party one has to be obedi-
      ent. I’ve never been obedient.”
      Rather, he tried to depoliticize color.
      As Ms. Brodsky observed, “By way of
      experiencing color’s intense immediacy
      as light rather than pigment, the view-
      er’s eye is freed from the burden of inter-
      preting representational forms that are
      preordained by class or political mes-
      sages.”
      Nonetheless, current events have
      seeped into his site-specific projects.
      One of his earliest chromosaturation in-
      stallations, “Labyrinth for a Public
      Space,” was exhibited at the entrance to
      the Place de l’Odéon metro station in
      Paris in 1969, when the street protests of
      1968 would have been fresh in memory
      for anyone navigating the work’s maze
      of red, blue and green tinted Plexiglas.
      And in recent years, as Venezuelans
      by the millions have sought refuge from
      economic collapse and authoritarian
      rule, Mr. Cruz-Diez’s installation at
      Simón Bolívar airport has become a site
      of mourning and transition for people
      fleeing the country.
      In a biographical video on his founda-
      tion’s website, Mr. Cruz-Diez said: “I
      don’t make paintings, nor sculptures. I
      make platforms for occurrences. They
      are platforms where color is being
      produced, dissolved, generated in a per-
      petual instant. In it there’s no notion of
      past nor future. In it is the notion of the
      present moment, just like life.”

Venezuelan whose artworks made color move

CARLOS CRUZ-DIEZ

1923-

BY KAREN ROSENBERG

ATELIER CRUZ-DIEZ AND ADAGP, PARIS; LISA PREUD’HOMME

Carlos Cruz-Diez, one of Latin America’s greatest postwar artists, in Paris in 2018. Right, a visitor reacting to Mr. Cruz-Diez’s “Translucent Chromointerferent Environment.”

HAROLD CUNNINGHAM/GETTY IMAGES

“So intense is the light that the

colors seem to be felt rather than

seen, like heat. The sensation is

slightly disorienting.”

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