French artist is a ‘stunned rock’ star
Print Edition
A FRENCH artist emerged from a week entombed inside a 12-ton rock yesterday and said he was “a little stunned” by the experience.
Abraham Poincheval, 44, had difficulty walking as he was helped from the stone onto a chair before being taken away for a medical examination.
His extreme performance at a Paris art museum has become something of a sensation in the French capital, with crowds thronging the Palais de Tokyo to watch him inside through an infra-red camera.
Hundreds have tried to talk to him through a crack in the rock, with the artist revealing that some had read him poetry, played guitar or told him about their dreams and nightmares.
Poincheval, who has spent a fortnight sewn-up inside a stuffed bear, had said through a crack in the limestone boulder that his confinement had been “like tripping.”
“I am travelling in this rock without moving, like an astronaut,” he said, buoyed up by the fact that he had “got into people’s heads.”
Poincheval carved out a hole inside the rock in his own image, just big enough for him to sit up in, with a niche to hold supplies of water, soup and dried meat.
Dubbed France’s most extreme artist, he will attempt to become a human hen later this month and hatch a dozen eggs by sitting on them for weeks on end. Lack of sleep rather than claustrophobia was his biggest worry inside the darkness of the rock, he said.
Without a watch — and with only an emergency phone line — he had no way to tell the time. The artist could only move his feet and hands a few inches, and had to store his excrement around him.
Poincheval is no stranger to bizarre performances.
He ate worms and beetles while living inside the bear, was buried under a rock for eight days and navigated France’s Rhone river inside a giant plastic corked bottle.
His inventor father Christian, who sports a white Santa Claus beard, is best known for coming up with pills that make farts smell of roses, violets and even chocolate.
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