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Throughout the twentieth century photomontage has had the potential to tear apart the world, revealing what is hidden, and to construct new and impossible visions.

In his 1990 book Images for the End of the Century, Peter Kennard assembled a 20-year retrospective of his powerful photomontages redefining them on its pages as algebraic elements within a series of visual equations. Now that we have reached the end of the century and the beginning of a new Millennium, we have a new Kennard publication Domesday Book. As the book opens we find the photomonteur himself approaching the Millennium Dome and stepping into his own work. Revealed by harsh security lights he stands before the Dome.

The original Domesday Book, published in 1086 near the beginning of the second Millennium, was a survey of the state of England, taking stock of its political and economic landscape. Faced with the site of third Millennium celebration, Kennard, too, attempts to take stock of the past, present and future. He flashes back through his own imagery, some from the nineties, some from before. The mathematical symbols from Images for the End of the Century expand into a series of haiku-style poems he has composed to accompany the pictures. Kennard unveils the contents of his own dome, 'A crush of photos, Folding into, The end of the century'.

Kennard then spins away from the celebratory zone to those nearby areas where the unseen live in the shadow of the London Eye, the giant wheel on the Thames. He represents his work from 'Welcome to Britain', pallets and placards bearing the ghostly traces of the homeless, the Domeless. Work from many years before is recycled; the stories they tell, Kennard suggests, are as relevant as ever. The early eighties montage of hands attempting to slice a measly meal of pennies on a plate with a knife and fork, reappears as an impoverished circle beneath the Dome's sphere of festivity.

Later on, the figures printed on the pages of financial newspapers that were torn at by the hands of the silenced victims of capitalism in Kennard's series 'Our Financial Times', return. Once again Kennard appears in his work. his own skin in close-up apparently branded by columns of monetary information. As so often in Kennard's imagery, the fiscal and the physical blend and clash.

And in reverse, as Domesday Book (MUP, paperback, £14.00) ends with a dramatic and seemingly endless series of faces printed upon the open pages of financial papers. Sometimes clearly printed, but occasionally palimpsests of blurred ink and numbers, the faces eyes stare back at us again and again and again accompanied by one repeated word: Speak: Speak: Speak... The sequence does finally end, as it surely had to, with the image of a child it's eyes two dark circles.

The Dublin-based artist, Sean Hillen, invokes a world of juxtapositions even more colourful and incongruous than the contents of the Millennium Dome. Garishly bright where Kennard's book is gritty and monochrome, and with playful prose opposite each single-page image, Hillen's Irelantis (Irelantis Ltd, hardback, £19.95) is a guidebook to a fictional country; and simultaneously the story of how it was created.

Hillen's primary source material to build Irelantis, he reveals, was the colourful john Hinde postcards popular in the sixties and seventies, Initially based in Ireland, the creators of these postcards were not averse to a bit of montage themselves, crudely sticking tourists and flowers into the foregrounds of landscapes and pasting impossibly hued sunsets over cloudy skies.
John Hinde postcards helped to represent the myth of rural Ireland; donkeys carrying turf led by red-haired children, fisherman in Aran sweaters mending their nets and an impossibly blue river Liffey flowing through Dublin at night. When Hillen appropriates and adds to the cards to create Irelantis things get stranger still. The red-haired children fill the donkey panniers with glowing meteorites, a man in a bright red jumper gazes down at the Great Pyramids dotted around the valley of Carlingford Lough and a whale's tail emerges dripping from the waters of the Liffey as people pass by in rowing boats.

Initially, the book may seem like a parody of the Irish heritage industry. By mixing traditional iconography with exotica from around the world (and beyond) Hillen seems to be sending up the myth through absurd exaggeration. But there is a lot more to Irelantis than that. Hillen, it seems, genuinely believes in the world he creates. Like Kennard in Domesday Book, Hillen lives within his imagery. Born in Newry an hour after Yuri Gagarin landed back on earth from his journey through space, Hillen montages himself with the cosmonaut to become the alter ego, Newry Gagarin. In one image Newry Gagarin orbits above Dublin, Irelantis and we see the country revealed as a rural egg floating in space. Elsewhere in his text Hillen returns to Earth as he describes using a microscope to build his world, 'Magnified, the scalpel is a shovel and the cutting of the postcards like cutting turf.

As this phrase suggests Hillen, like Kennard, belongs to a tradition of 'hands-on' photomontage. Both artists take obvious pleasure in the physicality of their materials -which might appear anachronistic in the light of recent digital montage work; yet there is something in Kennard and Hillen's montages, in which you can see the joins, that creates a different effect to the seamless constructions of, for example, Pedro Meyer or lnez Van Lamsveerde. The iconoclastic connotations of slicing up actual photographs is a characteristic feature of photomontage.

Throughout the twentieth century, photomontage has had the potential to tear apart the world, revealing what is hidden, and to construct new and impossible visions. Works such as Hannah Hooch's 'Cut With the Kitchen Knife', Paul Citroen's 'Metropolis', John Heartfield's 'Adolf the Superman', Richard Hamilton's 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' and Martha Rosier's series 'Bringing the War Home' all display a combination of subversion and playfulness; aspects represented in the photomontages of Kennard and Hillen.

Stephen Bull is an artist, writer and lecturer