There's art that's dangerous, and then there's art that's dangerous. That is to say, you can present an idea that threatens the way society sees itself or you can take a heap of steel and concrete and turn it into an art object that could also crush your head if you stood in the wrong place, or whack you in the knee, or, really, serve to arm some radical insurgency willing to wage deeply unconventional warfare. The Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino has, more or less, both kinds in mind.

In point of fact, there are many ways to get maimed in Sassolino's studio. The block of wood being cracked in half by a piston pulling the chains binding it could shoot out a shard like a jagged boomerang when the tension breaks it in two. A nine-ton wall of steel, suspended in the air, could drop on your foot. Any amount of concrete, at any time, could fall on your head. Or the bomb could go off. "I want to put this pressure on the viewer," Sassolino told me, firing up the steel wall, which is levitated by an enormous magnetized pulley system until, after hanging in the air an unspecified amount of time, it is released. "I want to put people in a physical situation — I want to make things a little nervous." When that wall crashes down onto the concrete floor — creating a tremor so powerful that his neighbors have asked him to stop knocking their drywall loose — he achieves his goal. "People laugh," he says, "but they don't want to get too close."

Sassolino makes kinetic sculptures of a certain mechanized menace, machines that crash and crawl and crush and fire and fall. His large studio in Vicenza, Italy, is like the laboratory of a perverse engineer producing an army of machines with which to depopulate the earth. The town of some 100,000 residents is half an hour from Venice and best known for the work of Andrea Palladio, the 16th-century architect whose work served as a model for the pattern, proportion, and ornament for much of modern Western architecture. Vicenza's central squares are an all-star collection of old-world postcards — gorgeous stone vaults and porticos — but outside the center, this beauty is being overrun by rapid industrialization. Sassolino's studio is just off the autostrada, outside town, surrounded by land being ripped up by earthmovers, factories, and cars zipping by; the neighborhood, like his work, has much more to do with a mechanized environment than with Palladio's palazzos.

Unlike all the products being churned out around them, Sassolino's machines aren't for use — they are operational but not operative. The bomb in his studio — a half-ton space-age-looking metal pressure tank filled with nitrogen that he designed with a local oil and gas equipment manufacturer — could conceivably explode one day if it isn't treated carefully, but it is not actually designed to hurt anyone: Its purpose is not to kill but to make you consider its potential power. Sassolino wants to make people think about the fragility of life — and he chooses to emphasize power and force rather than the human softness that might yield to them. He comes from a tradition leading out of Leonardo's dream machines, surely, but for his part, Sassolino is most attracted to minimalists like Richard Serra or Donald Judd, and the experiments in land art by Robert Smithson, and feels a great affinity for modern Italian art, such as the work of Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, and the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and '70s, with its urban aesthetic dedicated to creating art from unexpected, everyday materials.