Art is a response to context, an extension of the life we know and a reply to it. Whatever its goals, art inevitably changes things. Amid its many definitions and manifestations, we often fail to acknowledge this aspect of art's power.

"A Given Circumstance (gestures in situ)," an international exhibition at Arcadia University organized jointly by Richard Torchia and Curatorial Fellow Sandra Firmin, is about changing things in understated, even subversive ways. The work in the show is antithetical to what Marshall McLuhan called "hot" media, which aggressively stimulates passive consumers. "Gestures" invites viewers to actively consider artworks. Indeed, it requires a positive perceptual quest to notice items like Rebecca Holland's A Reflected Line, a band of mirrors laid along the tops of gallery baseboards. They cast a white aura of reflected light against the walls, echoing the eccentricities of the baseboard carpentry.

A couple of works do draw the eye downward to the interrupted perimeter of silver. Erwin Wurm's photograph of one of his dust sculptures is hung near the baseboards. In the 1990s, Wurm recorded the shapes of objects in dust before removing them, leaving transitory evidence of their shapes.

Like the baseboards, the cement floor of the gallery (once Arcadia's powerhouse) is frankly imperfect. Koo Jeong-a's Flying Carpet I, a small, stained Turkish-weave cleaning cloth, looks right at home there. But Jeong-a's "carpet" is stained with so many different colors that it must have touched art. A blurred, bleached cross testifies both to numerous washings and to careful folding. Torchia told me that Jeong-a flew the "Flying Carpet" to the exhibition with instructions that it be placed in an unlighted corner. I asked, "Did she say to put it diagonally like that?" "No," Firmin replied. "We thought that looked right."

Jeong-a's interest in the residual and ghostly is typical of contemporary Korean artists, though she currently lives in Paris. This art elicits intense observation. It is ascetic, reserved. We must journey toward it. For some, it may seem sadly devoid of technical mastery and only marginally aware of the art traditions of any culture -- even Duchamp. But this reticent art is an effective alternative to the barrage of cleverly coded stimuli that relentlessly solicits us on the streets and in our homes.

How can art set itself apart from an oppressive and invasive context? Today perhaps the best tactic is, perversely, by blending in, by adopting protective coloration.

Gabriel Orozco photographs "sculpture" that has occurred. Two trash-can liners turned inside-out or an ice-cream cone caught in the branches of a bush become iconic if one chooses to see them that way. The pleasure is not merely in the form and color, but in the choice. It's a pleasure available to rich and poor alike.

In the natural world, protective coloration is also called mimicry. Chemi Rosado Seijo calls it tapando para ver ("covering to see"). His strategy in his ongoing El Cerro (The Hillside) project in Naranjito, Puerto Rico, is to paint all the buildings on a hillside green to match the surrounding mountains. He solicited the collaboration of homeowners by offering to paint their dwellings any shade of green they chose. As documented through photographs, over time, more and more have agreed. One did so on the condition that his chimney be painted red. Others have painted railings and other areas in contrasting colors, but El Cerro is becoming more green and more visually unified all the time -- though one must admit that it's closer to emerald than leaf green. Local artists and other villages have been influenced by Seijo's idea.

Perhaps the most covert project, recorded in an out-of-focus photograph, was Dean Hughes' re-embroidery of patterns on London bus seat upholstery. Hughes matched color and pattern in his secret project, which he ended, Torchia says, when he found himself sitting on a seat he had embroidered, something he discovered only by touch.

Berlin resident Björn Hegardt carefully positioned a mirror to interpolate a section of lockstep East German façade from a building on one side of the street into an identical building on the other. Like most of these "gestures," it is recorded in a photograph.

In the natural world, Nina Katchadourian does not use protective coloration when she mends broken spider webs with red thread. Documented in photographs, her mends are only fair imitations of spider architecture. They are inevitably rejected by resident spiders who dismantle them and repair their own webs.

When confronted with the work in this exhibition, some viewers may be tempted to say, "Why, I could do that. It takes no special skill." This is a fine response. These artists invite us to do as they are doing, to see as they are seeing -- to move away from force-fed visual culture to subtle and contemplative spaces of our choosing. We can, like the spider, quietly mend our own perceptual webs and also enjoy the insights to be found in this reticent art.

A Given Circumstance (gestures in situ), through Dec. 20, Arcadia University Art Gallery, 450 S. Easton Rd., Glenside, 267-620-4114