What appears to be up in the air are the metaphors we hold constituent in things. Lozano’s escalation of the conduit metaphor to a speech act in 1969 was an effective, albeit juvenile, refusal to accept the last twelve issues of America’s leading art magazine as a law on par with gravity. Written as statements and executed as processes, Lozano’s Language pieces consisted of chains of decisions, based on self-organization and rules, and that ranged from dropping acid every day to making phone calls. One of many Language pieces as diverse in Machiavelli’s theory of the art of the state, their existence beyond conceptual thought is meaningless, it’s meaningless that it’s meaningless, and it’s this way because “there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of thing.”
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In this narrative performance for video, Burden tells the story of his relationship with a truck named "Big Job." To relate his autobiographical monologue, he sits deadpan before the camera with moving images of the truck behind him. Writes Burden, "During a six-month period, while the artist wrestles with the problem of owning an antique 16,000 lb. freight-truck, Big Job becomes a metaphor for personal insanity. [I] talk about the 'curse of Big Job,' my foiled plans to transform the truck into a rolling communications command post or a traveling museum, and my difficulty in getting rid of the rig. A true story."