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It's not every day you see a person climb out of a road.
But that's exactly what well over 1,000 people who braved Hobart's freezing winter weather did on Sunday night, to watch 73-year-old Mike Parr emerge from Macquarie Street.
The carefully-curated spectacle was two hours in the making, more than 70 hours after Parr took the plunge and climbed into his purpose-built steel container on Thursday.
As a bulldozer used chains to pull the slab of road off the endurance artist's temporary home and a ladder went into the hole, a hush fell over the crowd.
As Parr emerged from within and stood for a moment in the middle of Macquarie Street, the scene was almost anti-climactic.
Without a word he exited the scene via the old Mercury newspaper building, amid cries of "encore" from one group of onlookers closest to him.
Then, he was gone.
For three days, the veteran provocateur had been entombed in the box as part of Hobart's Dark Mofo winter festival.
Known as an endurance performance artist, Parr tried to get approval for the extreme work, entitled "Underneath the Bitumen the Artist" in two other cities before being accepted by Hobart.
Cement will be poured into the chamber ready for workers to reseal the surface before the road reopens at midnight.
During his stay oxygen had been pumped into the chamber, where Parr had been fasting and limiting his intake of fluids.
After he entered the box there had been limited viewing potential, but that did not stopped a swirling of debate and imagined scenarios around the performance.
People have had their photos taken at the spot, drivers have tooted horns and taken deliberate detours to have the experience of driving over him.
A fake Twitter account has even sprung up amidst the chatter, with a humorous take on Mr Parr's time underground.
Entitled "Sub-Parr: Performance artist and vehicle upskirter… live tweeting from Lane 2, Macquarie Street, Hobart", it has provided a steady stream of commentary over the last few days.
"Car, Car, Car, Bus, Van, Car, Car, Car, Car, Truck, Car, Car, Car," read one tweet, while others were simply "Van," "Logging truck," and "I'm sitting in about 5 inches of water. Is it raining?"
With Dark Mofo in full swing on the streets of Hobart, there has also been a steady stream of onlookers around the slab of road and drivers keen to drive over the site.
The performance has attracted international attention with the New York Times covering the event and thousands of social media comments flowing.
Many watching ABC Hobart's live Facebook coverage were struggling to find meaning in the art but others opted for a more humorous tone, with Debra Bryan posting "Blessed are the Excavated".
On a serious note, the piece has drawn its own controversy, with a mixed response from Tasmania's Aboriginal community.
Billed as a memorial to "the victims of twentieth-century totalitarian violence in all of its ideological forms, including the shadow cast by the genocidal violence of nineteenth-century British colonialism in Australia," its contents will be kept beneath the road as "a time capsule for future generations".
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre's Heather Sculthorpe branded the work "insulting".
But other representatives of the TAC and Aboriginal community hailed the piece as a chance to raise awareness of a difficult past.
About 3,000 people turned out on Thursday night to watch the artist enter the chamber.
The work, Mr Parr's third for Dark Mofo, is funded by the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) which has run the winter festival for five years.
The artist will speak about his experience at the University of Tasmania on Tuesday.
Topics: contemporary-art, performance-art, carnivals-and-festivals, hobart-7000
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