LONDON — Tate Britain has just unveiled the 2012 Turner Prize exhibition, and this year's selection, Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble, and Elizabeth Price, feels particularly balanced. There's drawing, sculpture, film, photography, video — even performance. It's as if the jury had made a concerted effort to satisfy most of the art world's diverse contingents (except of course the Stuckists, who yesterday stood outside Tate with leaflets claiming "Serota Needs a Good Spanking").

By definition no umbrella theme articulates the works on display, but the 2012 Turner Prize nominees all seem to revel in overlapping networks of historical, cultural, and artistic reference. Paul Noble's breathtakingly detailed graphite drawings map "Nobston Newtown," a fictional place the artist has been working on for the last 16 years. The starting point is usually a group of letters that become the buildings of a phantasmagorical landscape, in infinite gradations of greys. Noble's working process is illumination gone wild: beginning with the seed of a name — Trev, Joe — he conjures up a dystopian future in which human figures are distant memories. In his "Volume" series, the artist tackles the overbearing master of British art, Henry Moore. Six drawings compile all of Moore's sculptures in each of the six volumes of his catalogue résumé: heaps of soft shapes pilled on the page like rubble.

The junior of this year's shortlist, Luke Fowler, presents "All Divided Selves" (2011), a film-essay on Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. The film — Fowler's third on the subject — is a collage of period footage showing the leader of anti-psychiatry, woven together with snippets of psychiatric sessions, and recent images shot by the artist. It's a compelling portrait, though somewhat burdened by the long tradition of alternative documentary (inaugurated by the likes of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker) that Fowler gestures towards. His homage descends into nostalgia. The same occurs in the series of photographs recording in brilliantly retro colours the artist's everyday: his friends, his band, his contemplative musings on this and that. Jonas Mekas's filmic diaries come to mind, as does Wolfgang Tillmans, and indeed Instagram. Yet this passéist aesthetic might well be what makes Fowler's work feel so of-the-moment.

After this tinkering with cinematic codes, Elizabeth Price's "The Woolworths Choir of 1979" (2012) is an exhilarating video blast. The 20-minute piece includes archival images of ecclesiastic furniture, onscreen explanations of little-known architectural terms, hand-clapping noises, grainy girl band videos, loud beats, and news footage of a Manchester fire in 1979. But this is saying little of Price's work. This video is one of the very few artworks truly worth describing as more than the sum of its parts. "The Woolworth Choir 1979" is as much an experiment in lateral history as it is an immersive experience: disorientating, challenging, and blissfully stimulating.

Spartacus Chetwynd — who changed her first name to capture some of the celebrated Roman slave's quixotic idealism — here adapts "Odd Man Out," a five hour-long performance first staged at London's Sadie Coles last year, touching on notions of democracy, free will, and decision-making. In the first extract, lean actors, dressed in comedy camouflage outfits, dance around a red pouffe before bringing in a mean-looking effigy of "the oracle," which delivers its visions to a selected few members of the public. In the second extract, puppeteers enact the biblical episode in which the crowd chooses the criminal Barabbas over Jesus for Pilate's mercy (but you would be hard-pressed to find this out just looking at the cheerfully grotesque marionettes). Chetwynd's practice pertains to carnivals, théâtre de l'absurde, Dada, and street parades — cathartic rebellions against the status quo. And although tamed by this curtailed, museum-friendly version, the "Odd Man Out" injects some welcome grit into Tate's smooth curatorial operations.

The winner will be announced by actor Jude Law during an award ceremony at Tate Britain on December 3rd, 2012.

Turner Prize 2012, October 2, 2012 – January 6, 2013, Tate Britain, London.

To see installation views of the exhibition, click on the slide show.