Providing heterogeneous accounts of the intersections between the fine art world with literature, jazz, film, and theater in New York, Paris, Milan, Brazil, and Cuba between 1959 and 1960, the contributors show this period to be pivotal in the culture and politics of Western Europe and the Americas.

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction / Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brien  1 1. Cahiers du Cinéma Interview / Jean-Luc Godard  22 Part I. Cheek to Cheek in Paris and New York 2. Marcel Duchamp: The Signature Machine—Identity, Authority, Dispossession / Hadrien Laroche  31 3. The Young and the Old / Richard Leeman  60 4. Redefining the Boundaries of Culture: The French Experience of Jazz / Ludovic Tournès  82 5. A Critical Season for Alan Katz / Éric de Chassey  99 6. The Cacodylic Mind: Francis Picabia and the Neo-Avant-Garde, 1953–1963 / Tom McDonough  112 Part II. Violence, Machines, and Bodies 7. The Paradox of Time: Nouveau Réalisme's Curious "Archaeology of the Present" / Jill Carrick  129 8. To Be an "Exemplary" Machine: Tinguely's Homage to New York / Mari Dumett  152 9. Naked Lunch and the Neighbor / Clint Burnbaum  177 10. Bodybuilding or Bodycrushing? From Art to Theater: From Bodies to Corpses, a Rhizomatic Meditation on the Contemporary West / Regis Michel  191 Part III. Time Is Longer Than Any Distance 11. Action Writing/Action Reading / Luc Lang  205 12. From the Genius in the Mountain to the Party in the Dark: Art, Cinema, and Cultural Politics at the Beginning of the Cuban Revolution / Antonio Eligio (Tonel)  211 13. Disorder and Progress in Brazilian Visual Culture, 1959 / Aleca Le Blanc  234 14. That Tingling Sensation: 1959 and William Castle's The Tingler / Kjetil Radje  255 15. Atopic Atomic: Picro Manzoni's Space-Age Subtext and the "Ins and Outs" of the Modern Intellectual / Carla Benzan  275 Selected Bibliography  313 Contributors  319 Index  323

"Excellent. . . . Breathless Days should be considered essential reading for those seeking a deeper understanding of a fascinating range of works created in a turbulent period of twentieth-century history."

"Edited by two outstanding scholars, Breathless Days, 1959–1960 works to replace prevailing globalized and national narratives with a set of multipronged and heterogeneous studies of artworks, ideas, and events that emerged during those two years. In contrast to the usual emphases on the sixties, 1959–1960 is offered as a missing moment, an unseen linchpin, the close reading of which in this volume promises to expose a different, more accurate, and suggestive reading of the entire postwar period."