I can understand the logic of having installation artist Mike Nelson represent Britain at the 2011 Venice Biennale. An installationist has never had their way with the British Pavilion, and among the biggest hits in recent years at Venice have been Gregor Schneider's reconstruction of his creepy, claustrophobic suburban house in the German pavilion in 2001, and Elmgreen and Dragset's remodelling of the Danish and Nordic pavilions into a pair of collector's mansions in 2009 – replete with artworks, lounging houseboys and a body floating face down in the outdoor pool.  In 2009, British artist Liam Gillick represented Germany with a silly installation in which a talking animatronic cat presided over a maze of fitted kitchen units, and the French pavilion was transformed into a sort of prison-themed disco, waiting for a party that never happened. Christian Boltanski, whose wonderful installation for Monumenta in Paris's Grand Palais ended a month ago, represents France in 2011, in the pavilion next door to Britain's. The most telling Venice installation of all was probably Hans Haacke's 1993 Germania, in which he tore up the floor in the otherwise empty, national socialist-era pavilion. Everyone else has had an immersive, hyper-realist installation makeover, so why not Britain? If queues at Venice won Golden Lions, installations would always win. The pavilion itself, in any case, faintly resembles a Guildford tearoom. The meta-fictions of Nelson's work are dark and often forlorn affairs – which relate, variously, to American artist Robert Smithson, to the novels of JG Ballard (a section of a Nelson installation is in the current show Crash, a homage to Ballard at London's Gagosian gallery), to the abject, the secretive, the disturbing. Storerooms and cab shacks, the dismal quarters of the unhinged; subterranean, ailing restaurants, a photographer's darkroom, a survivalist's backwoods cabin, bomb-maker's workshops and a conspiracy theorist's cluttered workroom are more Nelson's metier.  One of Nelson's installations rambled through an old brewery on the Giudecca at Venice in 2001 (all I recall are an endless succession of banging doors, and room after room of indeterminate squalor), and in 2007 his A Psychic Vacuum delighted and terrified New Yorkers in the old Essex Street market on Manhattan's lower East Side. Nelson is an often interesting artist, but not always a great one. One nagging question is why only three women have represented Britain since 1950. Bridget Riley shared the pavilion with sculptor Phillip King in 1968; Rachel Whiteread represented Britain in 1997, and in 2007 Tracey Emin was an abysmal choice.  In 2009, Steve McQueen had the pavilion (I was on the committee that selected him). If we are talking about world-class artists, Tacita Dean should really represent Britain soon. Perhaps having two film-makers in a row would have seemed too much. Maybe Dean, resident in Berlin for over a decade, could represent Germany next time. But I really hope Nelson does something extreme, and manages to excel himself. I really hope he fucks with the pavilion, and with our heads.
Adrian Searle: Britain's tearoom-like pavilion needs an installation to pull in the crowds, but is Mike Nelson's work world-class enough?