Hirsch Projects


Morgan (1968)

As a teenager I did not have a steed to carry me away from the limits of what was considered permissible, instead I went to "art house films" as an escape from everyday expectations. This led to my first book project, Morgan (1968), which arose from multiple viewing of the film Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966). What enthralled me was Czech director Karel Reisz's depiction of an artist, Morgan Delt (David Warner), as an "angry young man" whose iconoclastic fantasy life defied the Establishment way of life, leading him to be committed to an asylum. As part of the social upheaval of the late 1960s, I made an idiosyncratic book in an untraditional format utilizing unconventional materials as an expressionistic seeking my place in the world. The work juxtaposed images and text to visualize my disenchantment with the institutional structures that perpetuated inequality and stifled different ways of being. This protest book foreshadowed my own experience of getting drafted into the United States Army and ultimately being declared "mentally unfit" for the Vietnam War. It remains symbolic of my quest for "alternative" pathways both in art and in life.