Although Harald Szeemann worked with the term individual mythologies as early as the 1960s and first used it in 1963 during the Étienne Martin exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern, the term only became a buzzword for an artistic phenomenon in 1972. A milestone in this context is the Kassel documenta 5, where Harald Szeemann, as the general secretary of the exhibition responsible for selecting the artists, brought together a wide range of artistic positions on the theme "Questioning Reality" under the umbrella term of individual mythologies. Among the artists featured were Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, James Lee Byars, Jean Le Gac, and Paul Thek.