Domestic Appliance, Flowers East, London

Some time in the 1920s a group of artists centred in Zurich wanted to make a point about the uselessness of art. They wanted to make art and art-making seem provocatively, noisily useless. This group came to be known collectively as the Dadaists. One of their ploys was to make art that moved – because until then art had, generally speaking, been about inertia. You stood still when you contemplated it, and the art itself remained motionless, as one might expect of any dead thing. But what if art were to move? How would one's notions of reality – and of the reality of art – be disturbed?

A new show of kinetic art in east London takes up the story. Here we have a series of bizarre tableaux, and what they have in common is the fact that they are, to a greater or lesser to extent, machines. But not useful machines. These are machines without any sensible purpose – and is it not essential for a machine to have a sensible purpose if it is to call itself a machine at all?

First off, we come across a black ostrich – er, no, not exactly an ostrich, but certainly an ostrichy kind of a thing – which appears to be walking forwards, very delicately, and pulling behind it a baby carriage of some kind, complete with huge, spoked wheels that remind you of those old prams from the 1950s.

And yet when you come to look a bit more closely – the devil is always in the detail – you see that you are trying to explain to yourself what is, in fact, a piece of delightfully amusing, three-dimensional surrealism. The neck is a human arm, covered in ruffled silk or taffeta; the head consists of the pointy fingers of a hand; and the feet too, oh my God, are human hands, reared up on points. You could ask Tim Lewis, its maker, what all this signifies, but best just to back off and get to grips with the exploding chair, or the drill that's murderously assaulting a vacuum cleaner, or the chest of drawers that seems to be spilling water from every drawer, or the chair that's being bloodily assaulted by a human hand.

As the title of the show suggests, the show's theme is the domestic appliance – the table, the chair, the bed, the chest of drawers, the cupboard; in short, everything that we are accustomed to seeing and owning and using – and it is these very objects whose usefulness and traditional domestic purpose are denied or questioned or wrenched askew by the hand of the kinetic artist. In a work by Nathaniel Rackowe, a pair of cupboard doors hang slightly ajar, enabling us to see a thin sliver of eerie light – is that akin to the lane to the land of the dead, which WH Auden, in a celebrated early poem, once glimpsed in a cracked tea cup? In the show's single greatest spectacle, The Robotic Chair by Max Dean, Raffaello D'Andrea and Matt Donovan, the art work explodes into its constituent parts, and then, as if by some miracle, reconstitutes itself.

A wall-hung sheet of silver foil by Thomas Baumann looks, when motionless, like a pure piece of abstract geometry. Then it begins to move, expanding unpredictably, or squashing itself together, never quite able to determine its identity. Is it a piece of rather severe constructivist art, or is its goal auto-destruction, and is this act of self-erasure what the work is about? Like several of the pieces in this show, it seems to hang on the cusp between seriousness and high comedy.

To 13 September (020-7920 7777)