PERFORMANCE REVIEW : Sanchez Takes New Direction

In the last performance of a two-night run at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Hugo Sanchez surprised everyone by officially abandoning the use of ritual fire as the driving metaphor and focus of his work. A blackened wall in the LACE courtyard was the only evidence of Friday night’s “500 Years: Chronicles of a Resistance,” Sanchez’s final blaze and the Tijuana-based artist’s abrupt shift in a new direction.

Unfortunately, in Saturday’s altogether different program, “Una Frontera Bien Helada” (“A Very Cold Border”), it was unclear to the artist and his audience where this new course might lead.

Sanchez began by posturing like a matador, using the Mexican flag as a cape to make repeated passes over a burnt and severed cow’s head that sat on photocopies of Uncle Sam’s and other screaming faces. Going in for the kill, Sanchez planted miniature flags of Mexico and the United States as banderillas, joining both nations in the death and decay.

He then began to play the congas. However, the sound of the drums and a noisy, mechanical robot prop echoed in LACE’s performance gallery, all but drowning out a bilingual rap. Ranting with an intensity and poetic cadence that made the untamed acoustics all the more frustrating, Sanchez was riveting. But then it was over.

Without any new insights into the conflagration at our literal and figurative borders, Sanchez and his new direction were more unsatisfactory than evocative, his shouts saying nothing rather than simply going unheard.

Some had come to watch the flames, others to hear a more linear or at least audible examination of physical and mental borders. What they got was the difficult process of an artist experimenting with his own shifting borders. “You want to know fire?” Sanchez shot at one hostile questioner. “Find it within yourself.” Sanchez seems to be taking his own advice. He should just look a little deeper next time before taking it before an audience.