© Jon Pratty/24 Hour Museum

It's 48 tons, it's bright yellow and it flies through the air in a circle with a man driving it with his arms crossed. What is it? Well, in fact it's a flying steamroller, now entertaining passers-by outside Chelsea College of Art next to Tate Britain in London.

The 48 ton avian steamroller was dreamed up as a piece of performance art by veteran American performance artist Chris Burden.

South London Gallery - just down the road across the Thames took on the massive challenge of bringing Burden's steamroller work to the UK. They've presently got a major show of new work (at the gallery until November 5, 2006) by the American artist - who made his name in the 70's with some challenging and sometimes dangerous performance work which usually involved his own body.

© Jon Pratty/24 Hour Museum

First impressions of the flying steamroller setup are puzzling. It's all set up in a square adjacent to the College, across the road from Tate. There's a central steel mast, with a giant cross member upon which balances, at one end, big concrete blocks, and at the other the steamrolloer is suspended.

The ground is covered by a circle of gravel, with a concentric circle trackway worked into into it. The steamroller, which has a kind of veteran look to it, looks clean and new, objectified, not like a real machine somehow.

Every half hour during the day, warnings sound, and a man in a boiler suit walks across to the roller, mounts up, and he starts the engine. He is expressionless, moving almost like a robot. Once the engine starts, the machine starts to drive noisily round and round the central pillar, still on the ground.

© Jon Pratty/24 Hour Museum

After a few revolutions, there's a wierd moment of expectation as the central steel arm moves upwards, powered by a hydraulic jack at it's centre. Then slowly, quite gracefully, the roller swings upwards as it revolves, your eye caught too by the driver, who now stands back on his platform, folding his arms, still unmoved by the experience.

And then you see the whole extraordinary spectacle as Burden dreamed it - a snorting, noisy, really heavy, 48 ton road roller flying round and round, tethered to a steel support.

"We might see a road roller everytime we go on a motorway, but here Burden's taken it into a different context," explained Margot Heller, Director of The South London Gallery.

"Here it's presented out of it's normal surroundings, and it brings to mind - apart from the feelings you get of how heavy and dangerous it looks - questions about the physicality of stuff. Look at that skyscraper across the river. How did they get that material up there to the top of the building when they were building it? What challenges did they meet? And, apart from all that, there's even a sort of Dumbo feeling when the roller is flying round and round!"

It makes for a bizarre, exciting and slightly unnerving sight. Originally seen first in Europe in 1999, Heller and the South London Gallery team took on a big challenge getting the performance sculpture to Britian and erected in this genteel square. It's a really involving and thought provoking visual and aural experience.

Staged outside of a gallery space for the first time, the Steam Roller is an off-site addition to Burden's current exhibition at the SLG, 14 Magnolia Double Lamps, consisting of fourteen 1920s cast iron lamp posts from Los Angeles, showing at the until November 5 2006.