One cold day last spring, four young men in winter jackets sat at a picnic table in a Milwaukee park, eating Dunkin Donuts and trying to form a master plan. They wrote down a few words: “handmade,” “recycled,” “functional.” They threw around some guiding principles: make stuff for cheap and sell it for cheap, reach a bigger audience, have a purpose. “We didn’t know exactly what we were doing,” says Scott Reeder, who was at the picnic table that afternoon, “but we knew we wanted to do something.”
They called their group Milhaus–a combination of “Milwaukee” and “Bauhaus,” after the avant-garde Weimar design school–with the intention of thinking up a better name later. After a few meetings, they decided to spend less time worrying about formalities–like a better name, or a list of specific goals–and more time having fun.
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While they held down day jobs–Scott occasionally assisted abstract painter Laura Owens, Tyson freelanced in commercial film production, and Franklin did graphic design for a start-up clothing company–they also worked on individual projects. But the uncooperative art scene in LA quickly turned them off. “We were constantly surrounded by artists,” says Tyson, “but people rarely talked about art, and if they did it was just career gossip, like who sold what for how much money. People were really guarded and competitive. If you asked someone to do something he’d say, ‘Oh, well my rate is $20 an hour.’”
In early 2000 they heard from another high school friend, Chris Smith, who was living in Milwaukee. Smith had been teaching at the University of Wisconsin’s film school. He’d also recently won the grand jury prize at Sundance for American Movie, his film about the exhilarations and frustrations of another Milwaukee filmmaker, Mark Borchardt. On top of that Sony had granted Smith and his partner, Sarah Price, close to a million dollars for distribution rights.
Plus, after a year working on the project, the Reeders felt alienated from their audience. “All we knew was Fatguy2000 was posting on the board,” says Scott. “Who’s Fatguy2000? And who were the rest of the people looking at the site?” In early spring 2002 the Reeders, Chi, and Franklin also realized they missed painting and making other tangible art. “We were working on stuff together, but we weren’t making art,” says Scott.
The second major project took place in Chicago–at the Pilsen gallery Deluxe Projects, in spring 2002. The gallery had offered a solo show to Scott, who had moved here in January. But he wanted Milhaus to do something with the space instead, and the gallery agreed to it. So the Reeders, Franklin, Chi, Bobby Ciraldo, Theresa Columbus, Xav Leplae and his brother Didier, and several participants from the Crayola project moved into the gallery for a month. Spoofing on dorm-room furniture, they furnished the space using several dozen modular plywood boxes, which they’d built, and plastic milk crates they’d found, borrowed, or stolen. They also brought a hot plate and coolers so they could set up a makeshift kitchen, though they ended up eating out about every other day.
they’d spent a month perfecting–a series of interlocking angular arm moves and whole-body jerking–on one of the bridges over the Chicago River. Milhaus then went down to the water’s edge, got on a raft they’d built out of their boxes, lit fireworks, and paddled upstream. “We wanted to make it seem like we were going back to Milwaukee,” says Scott, “but the flat wooden paddles we built were useless.” They struggled for a couple hours, “and then we saw barges and stuff and got scared, so we retreated back to Pilsen.”
