Adventures in white space

As you read this, LA-based artist Doug Aitken is completing his mammoth, 21-screen takeover of the Serpentine Gallery. True to the current vogue for colonising every inch of exhibition space, Aitken's video wonderland promises to turn your sedate Serpentine visit upside down.

Lured across the park by a searchlight beaming from the gallery's rooftop lantern, you'll be directed straight down into the normally never-seen basement before being spat out into the south gallery and left to roam the building. At each stage of this odyssey you'll be immersed in Aitken's characteristically superslick video art and atmospheric soundtracks.

Such expansionist activity has reached fever pitch in the last year: the toast of the Venice Biennale was Gregor Schneider's fullsize reconstruction of his creepy and labyrinthine home in the German pavilion, while Turner Prize nominee Mike Nelson - in easily the best show in London this month - is currently infesting the ICA with an elaborate and grungy installation that incorporates the building's fire exits and side corridors. For Nelson, the use of peripheral spaces serves to make a smooth psychological transition between the ICA's distinctive clean, white appearance and his own sinister, rough-andready rooms.

Although it feels like a recent trend, this kind of "total art" experience has actually been around for at least 40 years. Back in the late Sixties, not using a gallery's main spaces carried a serious critique of the system. Now artists' intentions are more geared towards giving the public a one-off, highly charged experience. This is partly thanks to arts organisations like Artangel, which have pioneered the offbeat site-specific installation in disused churches, gentlemen's clubs and the former C&A in Oxford Street.

One unfortunate corollary of this tendency is The Queue. There was some evidence of this at last year's Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy, entrance to which was through a small hole in the wall into Gregor Schneider's dark and dusty reconstruction of his Cellar; this could only be reached by crawling and only a few people fitted in at a time, causing major tailbacks. It was more extreme in Venice, where in order to explore Schneider's Dead House, viewers were admitted on a strictly one in, one out basis. It's a credit to Schneider that his house was so damn weird inside it managed to overshadow the four-hour queue to access it.

That's right, four hours. Herein lies the flipside of artists wanting the viewer to be ravished by an intense and solitary experience. A long wait in a queue is like a mood-altering drug: it can make a good installation seem even better (after that much anticipation, aesthetic judgment flies out of the window) but it also makes a bad one even worse.

Mariko Mori's dreadful cybertemplein Apocalypse was a classic-example of the latter: the boredom of an hour-long wait was topped only by the ignominy of having to don a pair of daft white socks, both of which linger in the mind more than the insipid work itself.

Doug Aitken's take-over of the Serpentine was, in fact, as much to do with the curators' suggestion as with his own desire to fill every available corner. Julia Peyton Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery, explains: "After the renovation in 1998, we were very keen to see how far you could push the building - and this is the first time we have commissioned an artist to make one whole work for the space." Appropriately enough for an allsurfing LA artist like Aitken, the work is called New Ocean. And in keeping with his predilection for exotic locations (previous works have been filmed on the volcano-ravaged island of Monserrat and a private diamond reserve in the Namib Desert), New Ocean features sumptuous footage of Argentinian waterfalls, projected on to a circular screen in the rotunda, and of a melting Alaskan glacier. (Aitken is not a graduate of the handheld videocam on Walworth Road school of video art, thanks to a parallel career in pop promos and advertising.)

But isn't multi-screen video installation just the upmarket relative of theme-park 360-degree cinemas or Imax? Why take over the whole building in this way? Why not give us the fruits of these feature-film quality labours on one screen and let us sit back and enjoy it?

"Every inch of the work or of the architecture is a component of the narrative," says Aitken, and he seems hell-bent on wanting to make viewers replicate his own experience of moving through landscape.