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For the past five decades, feminist conceptual artist Eleanor Antin has created an anti-essentialist chronicle of herself Working within a range of media – including photography, film, writing and installation – Antin has explored a stream of selves, influenced by everything from Yiddish theatre to European cinema As she has commented: ‘I’ve always been addicted to masking, to the slipperiness of genre I despise purity It’s so boring What the hell, it doesn’t exist, anyway’   During her rise to prominence in New York’s downtown art scene of the late 1960s, when women artists and feminist themes were routinely excluded from gallery programming, Antin’s work presented female subjects with bare-knuckles chutzpah, depriving the viewer of the easy consolations of pathos or titillation A recent reappraisal of feminist art from this period, such as the showcase Sex Work: Feminist Art & Radical Politics at Frieze London – featuring the libidinal, uninhibited work of artists such as Marilyn Minter (sucking, rhinestone-studded mouths) and Renate Bertlmann (cacti sprouting hot pink dildos) – shows how defiantly these second-wave feminists exploded taboos around female sexuality and the body It also shows an establishment ready, 50 years on, to welcome them with open arms   But the current popularity of second-wave feminism comes with questions of how to read and receive the politics of these works today, and how to negotiate the way in which their former riotous, outsider charge is inevitably dampened by the embrace of the market   As Antin’s work comes back into the spotlight, how do her expressions of 1970s feminism come into conflict with contemporary identity politics? At a recent performance at the Serpentine gallery, Antin was grilled by an audience member about her use of blackface when inhabiting her persona of Eleanora Antinova, whom she invented in the early 1980s At the time, as Antin explained in a New York Times interview, the persona was an intended expression of solidarity with those caught within the intersecting oppressions of race and gender: ‘She’s an outsider, like women and blacks in our society… Antinova is