First look at the Turner Prize show

Spartacus Chetwynd’S eccentric performances might be the most immediately eye-catching entry on this year’s shortlist, but it is the least impressive.

She and her troupe may aim for amateurishness in their carnivalesque spectacles, as “a buffer against an increasingly professionalised art world”, as the catalogue puts it, but having seen a few of her performances, I have grown to find this ramshackle approach self-indulgent rather than refreshingly novel. Next to her the other artists are, in their own ways, beacons of clarity and precision. Elizabeth Price’s video The Woolworth’s Fire of 1979 (2012) splices together photographs of church architecture, a bunch of pop videos from YouTube and news footage of the department store fire in Manchester. It is a tense, stirring work which manages to be studious, fabulous and tragic in quick succession.

Paul Noble’s room is a delight, pulling together works spanning 16 years to lure us into Noble’s absurd fantastical world, Nobson Newtown. Several pencil drawings, some of them vast, cumulatively reveal Noble’s astonishingly rich imagination, an endlessly involving amalgam of cartoons, architectural drawings and illuminated manuscripts.

But the show’s standout work is Luke Fowler’s All Divided Selves (2011). It is 90 minutes long, but one of the most compelling and moving films yet to have graced the Turner Prize shows. Drawing on a dizzying breadth of footage of the Scottish “anti-psychiatrist” RD Laing, it is an impressionistic, visually dramatic piece which offers no judgement on this controversial figure but manages to convey his complexities and conflicts brilliantly.

Noble is fully deserving of the prize for his extraordinary long-term project, but on the evidence of this show, Fowler would be my winner.