Selected Writing

“Robarte el arte: Juan José Gurrola, Guerra Fría y neovanguardia mexicana,” in Los setenta mexicanos: una historia intelectual en fragmentos, ed. Luciano Concheiro San Vicente y Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert (México: UNAM, 2025). 

Refocus: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (EUP, 2023). 

“Escasez cum valor: de cómo J. J. Gurrola robó la idea del arte contemporáneo” in Colección editorial del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. México: INBAL, 2023.

Juan José Gurrola. Todo está perdido. México: INBAL, 2023

“Invisible Architecture, Radical Ethnography: Juan Downey and the Sound of Laughter” in Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, ed. Christopher Ballengee (Lexington Books, 2022).

“Inspiration for a Libidinal Cinema: Klossowski, Lyotard, and the Tableau Vivant,” in Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 44, no. 2, 2021. ISSN: 0252-8169.

“‘All Consciousness is Something’: Bergson, Deleuze, & Carrel on the Problems of a Scientific Application of Cinema” in Mediascape, Fall 2017. ISSN: 1558478X.

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“Theorizing the Accidental Readymade: Locating ‘Contemporary Art’ in Luis Barragán’s Desecrated Remains” (2021) (Password Required).

“Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Question of the Father” (2021) (Password Required).

“Juan Jose Gurrola and the Anti-Kinetic Film” (2018) (Password Required).

“JJ Gurrola and the Duchampian Readymade” (2018) (Password Required).

“Invisible Architectures, Radical Ethnographies: Auto-Ethnography and Experimentation in Juan Downey’s Video Trans Americas, 1973-1979″ (2017) (Password Required).

“Klossowski, Bataille, & the Sovereign Artist” (2017) (Password Required).

“The First Experimental Film Contest, Mexico City, 1964” (2017) (Password Required). 

“Beacon (1998) – Landscape, Sovereignty, Power” (2016) (Password Required).

“In the Shadow of the Figural: Genet/Klossowski/Lyotard” (2015) (Password Required).

“Laughter of the Gods: Nietzsche’s Concept of Polytheism” (2014) (Password Required).

“Sola Scriptura: Raúl Ruiz’s La vocation suspendue (1978)” (2014) (Password Required).

“‘Who’s Afraid of the Multitude?’: Brecht’s Vision for Hangmen Also Die!” (2013).

“Kracauer’s ‘Curious Realism’: Reading Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film” (2012).

African Spir, “Studies on Critical Philosophy” [excerpt of translation] (2010).

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Michael Newell Witte (UCSD) is an art historian, theorist, and translator. His research lies at the intersection of literature and the visual arts, juxtaposing the histories of aesthetic theory with the development of late 19th and 20th century global modernisms.