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Peter Voulkos’s Michelin X is a playful bronze assemblage made in 1965 and 1966. It reaches just under two feet high, four-and-a-half feet long, and a little over one-and-a-half feet at its widest. The slightly shiny warm-brown finish is burnished. Small areas of the surface are scratched and show bright moss-green patina accents. Although made two decades before children’s bead maze toys showed up on the US market, today, this sculpture might easily bring to mind one of these toys with its tangle of colorful, stiff wires and the chunky wooden beads that slide along them. Here, it looks like someone left mid-play-session; four oddly-shaped geometric forms are stacked and stuck up high at the center, flanked by three looping, winding, metal tubes.

The tubes are all the same diameter but unequal lengths. They are serpentine, and each curves and twists differently from the others. From a distance, each appears to be made of one long cylinder of bronze. Coming in closer, weld lines become apparent at the tubes’ bends, smooth and flush against the surface, but a little redder than the rest. While a bead maze toy’s tubes are anchored on both ends to a wooden base, this sculpture is free-form and has no base. Rather, there are six points where the tubes touch the ground, creating a spirited sense of balance. The beginning of each tube rests on the ground at an angle. And the end of each is attached to one of the four distinctive stacked geometric forms hovering at the center of the sculpture. There is a thick capital T lying on its side at the top of the stack. The other three forms are each shaped like a pill that has been jig-sawed in half. Each half-pill has a sharply-angled nook carved into it that makes the pieces look like they could interlock, though here, they do not.

The tube on the left starts as a sloping, upside-down U with one arm touching the ground. But the other U arm takes a sharp turn nearly halfway back down and plugs into the sideways letter T. The next tube is welded to the U near where it touches the ground, creating an X as they meet and head in opposite directions. This tube is much longer, and slopes up and toward the center shapes, then wriggles to the ground like cooked spaghetti. Its curves touch down in two places before the tube snakes up again at the very center and burrows into one of the half-pills just below the letter T. The third tube juts out of another half-pill in the stack on the right and switches back and forth like the tuning slides of a trumpet. It bumps the ground once, then curves back up and around, and slopes down. With its combination of cylindrical tubes and blocky forms, Michelin X feels grounded and steady, despite touching the ground at only six small points.