I stand before a monk who stands before me.

Mönch is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, first exhibited in the premillennial year of 1999. It is polyester, painted a matt black, and measures 192 cm by 63 cm by 46 cm – life size – being a cast of the artist's friend, Frank Fenstermacher (a richly appropriate name, perhaps, for this candid window-maker has provided the raw material for a uniquely opaque object).

I have seen it twice, in different galleries, though it feels more apt to say that I have visited it twice, or even visited him twice, except that, on the second occasion, the recognition belonged solely to me (that's part of an essential asymmetry we shall explore – that this artwork was not capable of recognising me as I recognised it). The word ‘visit’ might be a kind of key to the preceding chapters of this book. I visited the monk, which means that I saw him – ‘visit’ derives from the Latin verb videre, to see. But ‘visit’, at least in English, contains a peculiar counter-current of the invisible. It touches on ‘visitation’ with its sense of supernatural presence, a presence that is ‘there’ without being evident. This sense of the supernatural, or of an event that arrives obscurely from elsewhere, perhaps somewhere frightening, also imbues ‘visit’ when used, albeit archaically, as a verb, as in ‘vengeance was visited upon them’.