The New York Times International - 05.08.2019

(backadmin) #1
..
2 | MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

page t wo

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


  1. 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.”

РЕ
Еdating to the 1960s, were included indating to the 1960s, were included inЛ


works, which he called “physichromies,”
Л

works, which he called “physichromies,”
dating to the 1960s, were included indating to the 1960s, were included inЛ
И
works, which he called “physichromies,”
И
works, which he called “physichromies,”
dating to the 1960s, were included in
И
dating to the 1960s, were included in

З

as the viewer moves past them. These
З

as the viewer moves past them. These
works, which he called “physichromies,”works, which he called “physichromies,”З

as the viewer moves past them. Theseas the viewer moves past them. TheseПП
О

or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate
О

or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate
as the viewer moves past them. Theseas the viewer moves past them. TheseО

or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrateor Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrateДД
as the viewer moves past them. These

Д
as the viewer moves past them. These

Г

lief paintings of multicolored cardboard
Г

lief paintings of multicolored cardboard
or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrateor Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrateГ
О
lief paintings of multicolored cardboard
О
lief paintings of multicolored cardboard
or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate
О
or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate

Т

among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
Т

among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
lief paintings of multicolored cardboardlief paintings of multicolored cardboardТО

among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
О
among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
lief paintings of multicolored cardboardlief paintings of multicolored cardboardО

В

and the artist and educator Josef Albers,
В

and the artist and educator Josef Albers,
among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-В
И
and the artist and educator Josef Albers,
И
and the artist and educator Josef Albers,
among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
И
among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-

Л

by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionists
Л

by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionists
and the artist and educator Josef Albers,and the artist and educator Josef Albers,ЛА

by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionists
А

by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionists
and the artist and educator Josef Albers,and the artist and educator Josef Albers,А

Г

Building on chromatic experiments
Г

Building on chromatic experiments
by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionistsby Sir Isaac Newton, the ImpressionistsГР

Building on chromatic experiments
Р
Building on chromatic experiments
by Sir Isaac Newton, the Impressionistsby Sir Isaac Newton, the ImpressionistsР

Building on chromatic experimentsBuilding on chromatic experimentsУУП

class, culture or social standing.”
П

class, culture or social standing.”
Building on chromatic experimentsBuilding on chromatic experimentsП

class, culture or social standing.”class, culture or social standing.”ПП
А

open to everyone, regardless of age,
А

open to everyone, regardless of age,
class, culture or social standing.”class, culture or social standing.”А

"What's

lief paintings of multicolored cardboard

"What's

lief paintings of multicolored cardboard
or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate
"What's

or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate
as the viewer moves past them. Theseas the viewer moves past them. These "What's
works, which he called “physichromies,”
"What's
works, which he called “physichromies,”

News"

and the artist and educator Josef Albers,

News"

and the artist and educator Josef Albers,
among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
News"

among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
lief paintings of multicolored cardboardlief paintings of multicolored cardboardNews"

VK.COM/WSNWS

and the artist and educator Josef Albers,

VK.COM/WSNWS

and the artist and educator Josef Albers,
among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-

VK.COM/WSNWS

among others, Mr. Cruz-Diez devised re-
lief paintings of multicolored cardboard

VK.COM/WSNWS

lief paintings of multicolored cardboard
or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate

VK.COM/WSNWS

or Plexiglas strips that appear to vibrate
as the viewer moves past them. These

VK.COM/WSNWS

as the viewer moves past them. These
works, which he called “physichromies,”
VK.COM/WSNWS

works, which he called “physichromies,”
РЕЛИЗdating to the 1960s, were included indating to the 1960s, were included inVK.COM/WSNWS

ПОДГОТОВИЛА

ГРУППА

"What's News"

VK.COM/WSNWS
Free download pdf