Saints Alive: Michael Landy at the National

I was born and brought up in Barry in South Wales, a former coal port and seaside town that's probably best known these days as a location for hit TV romcom Gavin & Stacey. Back when I still wore short trousers, myself and various pals used to visit an amusement arcade on the promenade over at Barry Island. Inside was a selection of fairly morbid kinetic creations in glass cases. You would put a penny in the slot, and strange, rather sick things would happen. Our favourite was the electric chair. You put your money in, and a metal cap would lower onto the head of a doll dressed in prison garb, lights would flash and the chair would jiggle up and down. I never realised being an executioner could be so much fun.

Walking around Michael Landy's Saints Alive exhibition at the National  Gallery put me in mind of these creaky and rather sinsister old arcade installations. Inspired by Renaissance paintings of saintly goings-on in the Gallery collection, and evoking the medieval fascination for collecting and exhibiting saintly body parts, Landy's surreal constructions of fibre glass and bits of scrap metal clank and whirr on demand, although (with one exception) you don't have to put money in a slot to make them work. You just hit a pedal in the floor, and the saints crank into masochistic gear, beating breasts and foreheads, stabbing hearts and waving heated irons. You have to laugh, but it's an uneasy mirth, knowing that what you're cackling at is in reality not very funny at all. Unless you really are a sadist.

Strongly influenced by the work of pioneering kinetic sculptor Yves Tinguely, with a bit of Heath Robinson and Monty Python thrown in (whatever you do, don't mention the Spanish Inquisition), these are among the most improbable constructions you are ever likely to see. But is it art? Well, if art is meant to engage you on many different levels, and leave you asking some serious questions about (gulp) the meaning of life, then, yes it is. All this torture and masochism may look like historical eccentricity now. But we shouldn't get too complacent. Turn on the television news, and it's clear that, when it comes to inflicting pain in the name of crackpot ideas, we are not quite out of the woods, yet.

 Saints Alive is running at the National Gallery, London, until November, and it's free to get in.

Pax vobiscum, artsters!