My name is Gillian. I can turn your sad life into art

Gillian Wearing | Serpentine Gallery, London

Don't let the Serpentine Gallery's new, cruel "no seats" policy put you off enjoying Gillian Wearing's show. Punish the gallery, perhaps, for the pain caused by standing for videos of up to 30 minutes, by withholding your donation from their collection box. But don't miss or fail in your attention to this representative survey of one of Britain's best artists.

Don't let the Serpentine Gallery's new, cruel "no seats" policy put you off enjoying Gillian Wearing's show. Punish the gallery, perhaps, for the pain caused by standing for videos of up to 30 minutes, by withholding your donation from their collection box. But don't miss or fail in your attention to this representative survey of one of Britain's best artists.

Characterised by themes of inhibition and disinhibition, Wearing contrives devices to emphasise these, exploring the nature of emotional expression. Her work usually requires either public participation, or the placing of herself in public situations. Volunteers, recruited through advertisements, confess their dysfunctional truths to her video camera while disguised behind the safety of masks. Another work showing the artist parading down her local high street, with her head and face bandaged, is a tragicomedy of conspicuous emotional muteness.

Wearing describes the epic contradiction between vulnerability and intimacy, and the compensating strategies of control and power that emotional pain demands to avoid these. Inadequate, emotionally illiterate expressions of feeling become metaphors in the actual illiteracy or compromised texts of her participants. Here four framed and illiterate autograph documents, solicited by Wearing from four sad males, describe their alcoholically damaged, shared sexual relationship with one sad female.

The grand summation of Wearing's identification of compromised expressiveness is seen in Drunks. Like Jane Goodall, or those other indefatigable female field researchers who study primate communities, Wearing patiently established a relationship with a group of deeply damaged, arse scratching street drinkers. Videoed in her studio, on and off, over a period of a couple of years, the artist provided these living dead with large quantities of Tennants Super Lager. Shown over three large screens, these psychiatrically ill geniuses display an incontinence of the demonstrative emotions; variously isolating, conversing, caressing and offering endearments, as well as mutually boring, fighting and collapsing on each other. There is no moral judgement here, only a well crafted proof of the adage that alcoholics are just like everyone else, except more so. If Drunks sounds exploitative and grim, or - in contemporary therapy speak - co-dependent ... well, it is. But remember, the YBA phenomenon itself was a contrived social experiment in which vulnerable young artists were given unlimited supplies of alcohol, drugs and media attention, and look what happened there.

Anyway, Wearing offers a redemptive clause. Dancing in Peckham, a video work, shows the artist herself, dancing optimistically to the music of her own mind in the incongruous surroundings of a shopping mall. Elegant and effective, the artist dances - like this show itself - close to the edge.

* Gillian Wearing: Serpentine Gallery, W2 (020 7402 6075), to 29 October