Howard Fried: 40 Winks

"With a single exception the audience one by one slowly fell away from their exhausted Pied Piper.” –Moira Roth



“On December 10, 1971 I staged a piece called 40 Winks for a show of free live performances at the Berkeley Art Museum. The piece had two parts. The first was a long involved message which was posed as a riddle and delivered by me. It began as I destroyed a candled birthday cake by eating it and kneading it with my hands. Among those topics dealt with in riddled form were the Biblical use of the number “40” and the history of corporate and communal abuse of the individual in the name of large social configurations. At the message’s conclusion I posed the riddle’s specific directive “Who is they?” At this point I cut the table I was reading from in half and walked out of the museum. A narrator told the audience that the second part of 40 Winks, “The Journey” was about to begin. It would progressively add information possibly leading to the comprehension of the riddle. Those who wished to participate were asked to follow me. I began walking. A crowd followed. I answered no questions. The large group eventually dissipated. After about six hours of walking everyone had left except one person, Robin Winters. At about 2 a.m. we were stopped by the police in Hayward, California. They made me tell them the answer to the riddle. We went into a parking lot so Robin couldn’t hear.

The number “40” was used twice by Executive decree to wipe out specific generations of people. Agent Moses presided over one job for 40 years while Agent Noah presided over another for 40 days. I based my strategy on Agent Moses’ performance…

I planned to walk until everyone had freed themselves and gone home to their respective promised lands.” (source: Howard Fried, “Synchromatic Baseball,” Arts Magazine, v. 47, April 1973, pp. 60-63)

“By freeing themselves from the bondage of the situation, they gained at least a functional understanding of the piece. Fried structured it as a self-revelatory process of enlightenment or understanding for the participants, paralleling metaphorically Moses’ wandering for forty years until all those who had been slaves had died; in this case until they had stopped following him and had freed themselves.” (source: Suzanne Foley, Space/Time/Sound: A Decade in the Bay Area, 1981, p. 71)

(Feedback to the Future)