The 1964 Green Gallery, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Florian Holzherr, courtesy of Zwirner & Wirth
An installation view of “The 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition,” recreating a Dan Flavin show.

According to the New York Times we’re used to seeing Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures in spiffy and august museum settings, including the rotunda of the Guggenheim. In such surroundings they look sleek and commanding, sometimes quite grand, with neither electric wires nor hardware store bloodlines showing. When the work initially appeared more than 40 years ago, though, it made a different impression. And we can sense what it might have been from Zwirner & Wirth’s remarkable re-creation of Flavin’s first show — at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery on 57th Street in the late fall of 1964 — using fluorescent tubing as his sole medium.

The fixtures he chose were a kind of Duchampian ready-made. They were picked up in hardware stores, their color and size predetermined. The margin of invention lay in the ways Flavin could join single units and modulate colors through juxtaposition. In 1964 he was still feeling his way with all of this. So the compositions are fairly simple: one straight vertical line; a four-sided figure; three lines bundled together.

More challenging was the matter of placement: lights in corners, high on the wall, on the floor. Then there was color. No longer self-contained, the colors glowed across the wall, leaked into adjoining ones. So ambience was a big issue, and what started out as a show of individual pieces became a one-piece installation.

At the time, of course, the lights he was using were associated with advertising, display and industry, not art. They were functional workaday items, and their office-supply roots come across in Zwirner & Wirth’s undarkened gallery, where the sculptures look exposed and a little shabby.

But they also look fresh. During and after the 1960s, Flavin’s work entered museums and the art historical canon. He made it bigger and more imposing, corporate-style, and it became influential: there’s good bit of Flavin in the Olafur Eliasson survey at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1. Here at the beginning, though, when his fluorescent light sculptures were still just over the line from being ideas, their rawness feels straight from the drawing board. And they look both old and new, like Space Age antiques. HOLLAND