by Emily Hall

Seattle's newest art celebrity is Kathryn Gustafson, a landscape designer who recently won the competition to design a memorial for Diana, Princess of Wales. Gustafson, who lives on Vashon Island and maintains an office in London, submitted a design--a serene ring of flowing water in Hyde Park--that has been hotly contested in the British press, with one friend of the late princess calling it "a puddle."

That Gustafson's elegant design only narrowly beat (after months of deadlock, and by a single vote) a proposal by British artist Anish Kapoor tells us something about the ambivalent place of memorials in the art world. Kapoor, a Turner Prize-winning artist usually lumped in with the Young British Artists, makes sculpture that often involves a rather contentious relationship with the viewer, and often does it quite well. (His work When I Am Pregnant is a seamless bulge in a gallery wall that disappears when the viewer stands directly in front of it.)

Kapoor's design for the Diana memorial involved a water-jet-created dome of water (which, I learned in the Seattle Times, might have been tinted red, according to at least one report)--not his usual confrontation, but a much more, shall we say, vigorous memorial. I'm not particularly surprised that serenity and flowy-ness won out over a temple of water shot masculinely into the air, but I would have been interested to see how British sang-froid, briefly melted into puddledom by Diana's death, would adapt. Well, at least it's not a pyre of paparazzi.

The questions that we seem to have to ask over and over again these days--with the Oklahoma City memorial, with Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial in Vienna, with the different reviled plans for Ground Zero--are, who is a memorial for? What purpose do they serve? Is the form adequate to the subject, and what is the subject anyway? Is it a peaceful ending, or cautionary tale? Granted, designing a memorial for a person universally loved is different from commemorating an act universally reviled, but it seems to me that the consideration of Kapoor brings a bit of interesting ambiguity into the blandness. Oh, I don't know, maybe he had a big old soft spot for the princess, but a cultural sign is a cultural sign.

As for the WTC memorial, my favorite proposal is still the twin piers reaching out into New York Harbor, a simple design that does a lot of emotional work. Check it out (www.twinpiers.com).

emily@thestranger.com