THAT question mark on the exhibition title is important.

In her exhibition statement, Impressions curator and Celtic supporter Anne McNeill recalls the Arts Council's exhibition of figurative paintings in the 1950s that presented football in an unquestioning way. "Only A Game? sets out to do the opposite," she says.

Manager McNeill selected four contemporary artists, Marcus Coates, Ravi Deepres, Julian Germain and Julie Henry and played the joker's card too in her own contribution: the Meet The Mascots installation that pins Yorkie and his fellow feathered and furred irritants to the wall.

The exhibition ethos? To inject a "healthy sense of disrespect towards the corporate mentality that has invaded the game" in the age of Roy Keane's contempt for the prawn-sandwich football viewer. The focus falls predominantly on the fans, their devotion and tribal ritual, their cultural iconography and nationalism.

In his photo and video installation, Ravi Deepres' Patriots explores national and social and individual identity through his hypnotic images of fans walking towards the camera at an England World Cup match in Japan in 2002. Deepres does that thing of slowing the film speed to suggest the crowd's herding instincts, but one minute rather than the full seven will reveal everything Patriots has to say.

Julie Henry spent nine months watching Crystal Palace fans go through the grinder as the Eagles slipped out of the Premiership in 1997-1998. Her photographs set football in a quasi-religious context, enhanced by her presenting the photographs with accompanying songsheets that mirror the design of choirboys' hymn books. For York and Leeds fans newly asphyxiated by the death rattle of relegation, Henry's Going Down will be a reminder as welcome as toothache; for smug others, there will be schadenfreude.

In the first of two Julian Germain contributions, Superheroes Eleven is a trophy cabinet of Subbuteo figures, transformed in team formation into a team of invincible superheroes to convey childhood obsession before the cynicism of age and the modern realities of the besmirched game kick in.

Upstairs, in the pick of the exhibits, digital artist Marcus Coates takes a Chelsea fan out of his usual habitat and plonks him in the incongruous environment of a forest glade in Out Of Season. His language is as blue as his shirt as he goes through his repertoire of chants, competing against the territorial bird song that his own absurd gestures and singing mirrors. Coates shoots, he scores.

In a counterpoint to Superheroes Eleven, Germain's portraits of Dutchman Dennis Bergkamp, Welshman Ryan Giggs and Dane Peter Schmeichel as bored-looking cheese factory worker, roadside daffodil seller and pig farmer respectively take the pampered Premiership A-team from superheroes to an alternative reality of national stereotypes. That they rise above the mundane is why we worship them, and not the mascots.

Updated: 11:59 Tuesday, May 18, 2004