"In 1990 Richard Rijnvos was invited to the German city of Darmstadt to be a guest composer at the new music summer courses held there every two years. During a free moment he escaped from the courses and discovered one of Darmstadt's greatest treasures, the installation in the Hessisches Landesmuseum known as the 'Block Beuys'. This collection of work by the German visual artist Joseph Beuys (1921-86) consists of about 270 objects arranged in seven rooms of varying sizes, and contains most of the forms and materials which Beuys habitually used-metal, felt, accretions of fat and food, machinery, newspaper. Rijnvos's Block Beuys, begun five years after his Darmstadt encounter, is his response to the collection."-hat[now]ART