^{Louise Lawler's cibachrome, crystal, and felt paperweight Untitled (Martin and Mike) (1992), from the exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne.}

With great art come great cults of personality, whether it's the boozy abstract expressionists at the Cedar bar, the waifish weirdos at Warhol's Factory, or the "non-productive" iconoclasts of Cologne in the 1980s and early 1990s, as Josef Strau calls them in Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne, the show currently at the Henry Art Gallery. The artists in Make Your Own Life—Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley, Jutta Koether, and Andrea Fraser, among others—often referred to each other in their work, or to earlier figures like Joseph Beuys and Eva Hesse.

So where are the cults of personality in Seattle art? Where is Seattle's scene?

Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel are best friends and artists at Crawl Space. They've been accused of being scenesters (and they are ever so young and attractive, true), but they say that's not possible. Because Seattle doesn't have a scene!

Does it? Mathern, Wentzel, and The Stranger's Jen Graves discover it's awkward to talk about scenes. It seems embarrassing to want one and dull not to have one. And what's the effect on the art?

Listen in.

^{Hans-Jörg Mayer's photograph The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1991) (l-r Charlene von Heyl, Michaela Eichwald, Jutta Koether, Cosima von Bonin, Isabelle Graw), from the exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne}

^{Anne Mathern's photograph Plaid (2006)}

^{Anne Mathern's photograph Yacht (2004) (she's also the model)}

^{An installation view of Chad Wentzel's last exhibition at Crawl Space, Everything I've Ever Wanted All At the Same Time (2006)}

^{An installation view of Chad Wentzel's last exhibition at Crawl Space, Everything I've Ever Wanted All At the Same Time (2006)}