Face to face with the things that go bump in the night

Due to the slew of summer blockbusters, I haven't had a chance to review an intriguing exhibition called The Shadow at Compton Verney. The show still has a month to run, though, and Compton Verney is the loveliest house in the loveliest part of England. So better late than never.

The shadow has a long history in Western art and thought. When Plato wanted to illustrate his theory of essential form, he wrote of prisoners looking at shadows cast on a cave wall. Jung personified the dark part of the human mind as a shadow. "Man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself to be," he wrote. "Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in conscious life, the blacker it is." For painters, shadows were both metaphors for the Manichean struggle of dark and light and a useful conveyor of mood. Some artists devoted their lives to painting them: works by one of these, Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), form a pendant to this exhibition.

At a guess, the point of The Shadow is to show that, for all the invention of videos and plasma screens and conceptualism, artists are still locked in Plato's cave. This is so clearly true that the point hardly seems worth making: as long as art uses solid forms, it will also use shadows. What the exhibition needs to do is look at work for which the shadow - psychic, scientific, metaphorical or actual - is a subject, not a by-product.

My only niggle (and I might as well get it over with now) is that a number of the pieces in Compton Verney's show don't really fit the bill. Doug Aitken's Lighttrain and Laurie Anderson's At the Shrink's are both extraordinary artworks, the former an elegant, five-screen video which exchanges form for narrative, the latter a bewitching bit of Andersonian psycho-drama. But can either of them in any sense be called shadow works? I don't think so.

On the other hand, Mona Hatoum's Misbah is shadowy in more ways than is easy to count. Misbah means "lamp" in Arabic, and Hatoum's looks like one of those pierced-metal hanging lamps you see in Moroccan bazaars. Instead of being decorated with cut-out stars alone, however, Hatoum's is also pierced with tiny soldiers. As Misbah spins on its cord, these present arms, take aim and fire, flickering across the wall of an airless room like a magic-lantern history of war. Seen in context - the flickering gunmen, the spinning stars - it is tempting to read the work as a commentary on the irresolvable clash of East and West, the endless cycle of killing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a sickening tale, and Hatoum's revolving shadows sicken you - literally, their dizzy whirl making you want to throw up.

Like Hatoum's installation, Fiona Tan's video Downside Up elides literal shadows with metaphorical ones. Shadows tend to be seen as secondary to the things that cast them; in Tan's lens, the reverse is true. As with Javanese wayang - Tan is Indonesian - the actual drama takes place in the negative, the solids that cast the shadows being mere props for the play. To drive the point home, Tan's long shadows - shot in black and white, of course - are the right way up, while the things that cast them - tiny figures, strolling or cycling along the cobbled street of what looks like a Dutch town - are upside down. At first, you try to extrapolate backwards, to deduce men and bicycles from the shadows they cast. Quite quickly, you give up. Like Plato, Tan leaves you wondering which way is up, where solidity lies.

Among the great ombristes of our time is the Frenchman, Christian Boltanski, a kind of latter-day de La Tour. Like Tan, Boltanski has a fascination with shadow puppets. He has also been brushing up on his Plato: the work included in this show, The Candles, recalls those poor Athenian prisoners shackled in their cave, tragically unaware that the things they see are ghosts.

Or are they? Boltanski's work consists of a dozen little copper men standing on tin shelves around the walls of a room, their shadows cast by candlelight. A small metal angel suddenly becomes a big shadow angel, or maybe a demon.

It is hard to say. Like Jung, like Plato, the act of projection splits things in two: to every object there is an unequal and opposite anti-object, to every light its dark. Boltanski's work unearths the night-scared child in us all, the shaggy man at the back of the cave. That alone is worth the trip.

To 9 September (01926 645500)

Further reading 'C J Jung, Psychology and Religion', Jungian Classic Series

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